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DEMOCRATIC IDEALS 
AND REALITY 



A STUDY IN THE POLITICS OF 
RECONSTRUCTION 



BY 



H. J. MACKINDER, M-P. 







NEW YORK 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 

1919 






CoPTKIOKt 1919 



HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 



2. c'c *r\o^ 



©CLA5256 2 

MAY 20 1919 



PREFACE 

This book, whatever its value, is the outcome 
of more than the merely feverous thought of 
War time; the ideas upon which it is based were 
published in outline a good dozen years ago. In 
1904, in a paper on "The Geographical Pivot 
of History," read before the Royal Geographical 
Society, I sketched the World-Island and the 
Heartland; and in 1905 I wrote in the National 
Review on the subject of "Man-power as a Meas- 
ure of National and Imperial Strength," an ar- 
ticle which I believe first gave vogue to the term 
Man-power. In that term is implicit not only 
the idea of fighting strength but also that of 
productivity, rather than wealth, as the focus 
of economic reasoning. If I now venture to 
write on these themes at somewhat greater 
length, it is because I feel that the War has es- 
tablished, and not shaken, my former points of 
view. 

; v H. J. M. 

1st February, 1919. 



CONTENTS 
CHAPTER I 

PAGE 

Perspective 3 

The Future and peace, 3; Causes of past wars, 4; Growth of 
opposing interests, 5; Danger of merely juridical conceptions of 
the League of Nations, 6; The possibility of a World-Tyranny, 
6; The problem stated, 7. 

CHAPTER II 

Social Momentum 8 

Democratic Idealism, its successive tragedies, 8, and its rela- 
tion to Reality, 11; The Economic Reality of the "Going Con- 
cern," 12; The organizers of Going Concerns, 14; The emergence 
of organizers from Revolution, 16; The organizer and social 
discipline, 17; The great Organizer is the great Realist, 19; 
Democratic prejudice against Experts, 20; The organizer thinks 
strategically, 21; His "ways and means" mind, 22; Napoleon, 
22; Bismarck, 23; The strategical mentality of Prussia, 27; "Kul- 
tur" and strategy, 27; The German war map, 27; Strategical 
thought in Economics, 30; But Democracy thinks ethically, 33; 
"No annexations, no indemnities," 34; Refuses to think strate- 
gically unless compelled to do so for defense, 35; Must fail unless 
it reckons with both geographical and economic Reality, 36. 

CHAPTER III 

The Seaman's Point of View .... 38 

The Unity of the Ocean, the first geographical Reality, 38; The 
consequences not yet fully accepted, 40; Therefore necessary to 
take a historical view, 41 ; Contending river-powers in Egypt, 43; 
vii 



viii CONTENTS 

PAGE 

The Nile "closed" by land-power, 44; Contending sea-powers in 
the Mediterranean, 44; The Mediterranean "closed" by land- 
power, 55; The Latin Peninsula as a sea-base, 56; The encom- 
passing of the World-Promontory by sea-power from the Latin 
peninsular base, 66; Division within the Latin European Penin- 
sula, 68; Hence the opportunity for sea-power from the lesser 
but insular sea-base of Britain, 69; Of sea-bases in general, 74; 
Of sea-power in the Great War, 75; The World-Island, 79; The 
ultimate base of sea-power, 89. 



CHAPTER IV 

The Landsman's Point of View ... 90 

The World-Island seen from within, 91 ; The Heartland physi- 
cally defined, 93; The other Natural Regions, 95; The Arabian 
Centerland, 109; The mobile riders and the plowmen, 114; 
The Arab bid for World Empire, 115; The Steppes-belt, 117; 
The Tartar invasions and their consequences, 121; The Tibetan 
Heights and the N. W. entries to China and India, 125; The open 
access from the Heartland to Arabia and to Europe, 127; The 
Heartland strategically defined, 130; The Black Sea basin in- 
cluded, 131; The Baltic basin included, 135; The Heartland as 
real a physical fact as the World-Island, 140; The ultimate cita- 
del of land-power, 140. 

CHAPTER V 

The Rivalry of Empires 141 

The Cossack advance over the Heartland, 141; The Russian 
Homeland, sharply delimited, 142; The real Europe, 147; Di- 
vided into East and West Europe, 148; History of the relations 
of East and West Europe, 149; Their fundamental opposition, 
153; Their essential difference, 154; German and Slav in East 
Europe, 154; Trafalgar seemed to split the stream of history into 
two for a century, 163; Britain and the Not-Europe, 164; But 
East Europe is really within the Heartland, and there were no 
two streams, 169; British and French policy agreed in the Nine- 
teenth Century, 170; The Great War caused by German attempt 



CONTENTS 



IX 



PAGE 

to control East Europe and the Heartland, 171 ; The Economic 
Reality of organized man-power — the Going Concern, 172; 
Political Economy and National Economy, 173; The great Eco- 
nomic change of 1878, 174; The German policy was to stimulate 
growth of man-power and then use it to occupy the Heartland, 
175; But Laissez-faire also a policy of Empire, 179; Clash of the 
two policies, 181; Inevitable from the fact that they were two 
Going Concerns, 182. 

CHAPTER VI 

The Freedom of Nations 183 

We have won the War, but were nearly defeated, 183; Had 
Germany won, if only on land, you would have had to reckon 
with a Heartland Empire, 185; The Heartland the persistent 
Geographical threat to World liberty, 186; How came Germany 
to make the mistake of offensive on West front, 190; Hamburg 
and the man-power policy, 190; We must now divide up East 
Europe and the Heartland, 191; It must be a division into three 
not two State-systems, 196; The peoples of the Middle Tier, 197; 
Feasibility of League of Nations, if this done, 206; But there 
must be no predominant partner, 207; Yet you will have to 
reckon with Going Concerns, 208; A reasonable equality of 
power needed among a considerable number of members of your 
League, 211; Of certain strategical positions of World impor- 
tance, 213; The Going Concern in the future, and the unequal 
growth of Nations, 218; The ideal is the Independent Nation of 
balanced economic development, 218; Tragedies of the Going 
Concern, 221; The policy of truly free nations which makes for 
Peace, 225. 

CHAPTER VII 

The Freedom of Men ..... 226 

Whether men and women will be more free in such free Na- 
tions, 226; The need of basing organization within the Nation on 
localities, 228; The alternative organization is based on nation- 
wide classes and interests, 229; This leads inevitably to interna- 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

tional war of classes, 229; Therefore the ideal is balanced prov- 
inces within balanced nations, 231; Such organization gives 
greatest opportunity to greatest number of men, 232; Cause of 
Nationality movement, 234; Opposed to undue centralization, 
136; Fraternal nations must be balanced economically, and 
formed of fraternal provinces, 241; Fraternity, if it is to last, 
depends on controlling the development of Going Concerns, 249. 



CHAPTER VIII 

Postscript ....... 252 

The recent General Election, its meaning in a World setting, 
252; Of the saving virtue of Neighborliness, 255. 

APPENDIX 

Note on an Incident at the Quai D'orsay, 25th 

January, 1919 257 

Index 259 



LIST OF MAPS AND DIAGRAMS 



FIG. 

1. A River-world apart — Egypt ..... 

2. A Coastal navigation — Britain ..... 

3. The Greek Seas — an insular and a peninsular sea-base . 

4. Latium — a fertile sea-base ...... 

5. The Mediterranean — two marches to outflank sea-power 

6. The Latin Sea 

7. The Latin Peninsula ....... 

8. The Latin and Greek Peninsulas — Germany and Macedonia 

9. The Seaman's Europe ...... 

10. The World-Promontory 

11. The English Plain — a fertile sea-base .... 

12. The World-Island and Satellites — relative areas . 

13. The World-Island and Satellites — relative populations . 

14. Euro- Asia — Arctic and Inland drainage 

15. The Great Lowland and the Heartland 

16. The World-Island — its Natural Regions 

17. The Southern Heartland . 

18. The Steppes of Euro-Asia . 

19. Northern Arabia — the fertile belt 

20. The mobile conquerors of the plowed landa 

21. A mediaeval Wheel-map 

22. East Europe — Forest and Steppes 

23. The Tibetan Heights and the N. W. approaches to China and 

India ........ 

24. The Heartland — including the Baltic and Black Sea basins 

25. Constantinople — when within and when without the Heartland 

26. The World-Island — knit together by Railways and Air-routes 

27. The Russian Homeland 

28. The real Europe — East and West 

29. Kottbus — an inlier of Wendish speech 

30. The Eastward German settlements 
81. The Middle Tier of East European States 



(t^J 



DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 



PERSPECTIVE 

Our memories are still full of the vivid detail 
of an all-absorbing warfare; there is, as it were, 
a screen between us and the things which hap- 
pened earlier even in our own lives. But the 
time has at last come to take larger views, and 
we must begin to think of our long War as of a 
single great event, a cataract in the stream of 
history. The last four years have been momen- 
tous, because they have been the outcome of 
one century and the prelude to another. Ten- 
sion between the nations had slowly accumu- 
lated, and, in the language of diplomacy, there 
has now been a detente. The temptation of the 
moment is to believe that unceasing peace will 
ensue merely because tired men are determined 
that there shall be no more war. But interna- 
tional tension will accumulate again, though 
slowly at first; there was a generation of peace 
after Waterloo. Who among the diplomats 
round the Congress table at Vienna in 1814 fore- 
saw that Prussia would become a menace to the 
world? Is it possible for us so to grade the 
stream bed of future history as that there shall 



4 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

be no more cataracts? That, and no smaller, 
is the task before us if we would have posterity 
think less meanly of our wisdom than we think 
of that of the diplomats of Vienna. 

The great wars of history — we have had a 
world-war about every hundred years for the 
last four centuries — are the outcome, direct or 
indirect, of the unequal growth of nations, and 
that unequal growth is not wholly due to the 
greater genius and energy of some nations as 
compared with others; in large measure it is the 
result of the uneven distribution of fertility and 
strategical opportunity upon the face of our 
globe. In other words, there is in nature no 
such thing as equality of opportunity for the 
nations. Unless I wholly misread the facts of 
geography, I would go further, and say that the 
grouping of lands and seas, and of fertility and 
natural pathways, is such as to lend itself to the 
growth of empires, and in the end of a single 
World Empire. If we are to realize our ideal of 
a League of Nations which shall prevent war 
in the future, we must recognize these geographi- 
cal realities and take steps to counter their in- 
fluence. Last century, under the spell of the 
Darwinian theory, men came to think that those 
forms of organization should survive which 
adapted themselves best to their naturrj environ- 
ment. To-day we realize, as we emerge from our 



PERSPECTIVE 5 

fiery trial, that human victory consists in our 
rising superior to such mere fatalism. 

Civilization is based on the organization of 
society so that we may render service to one 
another, and the higher the civilization the more 
minute tends to be the division of labor and 
the more complex the organization. A great 
and advanced society has, in consequence, a 
powerful momentum; without destroying the 
society itself you cannot suddenly check or di- 
vert its course. Thus it happens that years be- 
forehand detached observers are able to predict 
a coming clash of societies which are following 
convergent paths in their development. The 
historian commonly prefaces his narrative of 
war with an account of the blindness of men who 
refused to see the WTiting on the wall, but the 
fact is, that, like every other going concern, a 
national society can be shaped to a desired 
career while it is young, but when it is old its 
character is fixed and it is incapable of any great 
change in its mode of existence. To-day all 
the nations of the world are about to start 
afresh; is it within the reach of human fore- 
thought so to set their courses as that, notwith- 
standing geographical temptation, they shall 
not clash in the days of our grandchildren? 

In our anxiety to repudiate the ideas histori- 
cally associated with the Balance of Power, is 



6 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

there not perhaps some danger that we should 
allow merely juridical conceptions to rule our 
thoughts in regard to the League of Nations? 
It is our ideal that justice should be done be- 
tween nations, whether they be great or small, 
precisely as it is our ideal that there should be 
justice between men, whatever the difference of 
their positions in society. To maintain justice 
as between individual men the power of the 
State is invoked, and we now recognize, after 
the failure of international law to avert the 
Great War, that there must be some power or, 
as the lawyers say, some sanction for the main- 
tenance of justice as between nation and nation. 
But the power which is necessary for the rule of 
law among citizens passes easily into tyranny. 
Can we establish such a world power as shall 
suffice to keep the law between great and small 
States, and yet shall not grow into a world 
tyranny? There are two roads to such a tyr- 
anny, the one the conquest of all other nations 
by one nation, the other the perversion of the 
very international power itself which may be 
set up to coerce the lawless nation. In our great 
replanning of human society we must recognize 
that the skill and opportunity of the robber are 
prior facts to the Law of Robbery. In other 
words, we must envisage our vast problem as 
business men dealing with realities of growth 



PERSPECTIVE 7 

and opportunity, and not merely as lawyers 
defining rights and remedies. 

My endeavor, in the following pages, will 
be to measure the relative significance of the 
great features of our globe as tested by the 
events of history, including the history of the 
last four years, and then to consider how we may 
best adjust our ideals of freedom to these last- 
ing realities of our Earthly Home. But first we 
must recognize certain tendencies of human 
nature as exhibited in all forms of political or- 
ganization. 



II 

SOCIAL MOMENTUM 

" To him that hath shall be given " 

In the year 1789 the lucid French People, in 
its brain-town of Paris, saw visions, generous 
visions — Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. But 
presently French Idealism lost its hold on 
Reality, and drifted into the grip of Fate, in the 
person of Napoleon. With his military efficiency 
Napoleon restored order, but in doing so or- 
ganized a French Power the very law of whose 
being was a denial of Liberty. The story of the 
great French Revolution and Empire has influ- 
enced all subsequent political thought; it has 
seemed a tragedy in the old Greek sense of a 
disaster predestined in the very character of 
Revolutionary Idealism. 

When, therefore, in 1848, the peoples of 
Europe were again in a vision-seeing mood, 
their idealism was of a more complex nature. 
The principle of Nationality was added to that 
of Liberty, in the hope that liberty might be 
secured against the overreaching organizer by 
the independent spirit of nations. Unfortu- 
ately, in that year of revolutions, the good ship 



SOCIAL MOMENTUM 9 

Idealism again dragged her anchor, and by and 
by was swept away by Fate, in the person of 
Bismarck. With his Prussian efficiency Bis- 
marck perverted the new ideal of German 
Nationality, just as Napoleon had perverted 
the simpler French ideals of Liberty and Equal- 
ity. The tragedy of National Idealism, which 
we have just seen consummated, was not, how- 
ever, predestined in the disorder of Liberty, but 
in the materialism, commonly known as Kultur, 
of the organizer. The French tragedy was the 
simple tragedy of the breakdown of Idealism; 
but the German tragedy has, in truth, been the 
tragedy of the substituted Realism. 

In 1917 the Democratic Nations of the whole 
Earth thought they had seen a great harbor 
light when the Russian Czardom fell and the 
American Republic came into the War. For 
the time being, at any rate, the Russian Revo- 
lution has gone the common revolutionary way, 
but we still put our hope in Universal Democ- 
racy. To the eighteenth-century ideal of Lib- 
erty, and the nineteenth-century ideal of Na- 
tionality, we have added our twentieth-century 
ideal of the League of Nations. If a third 
tragedy were to ensue, it would be on a vast scale 
for democratic ideals are to-day the working 
creed of the greater part of humanity. The 
Germans, with their Real-Politik, their politics 



10 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

of reality — something other than merely prac- 
tical politics — regard that disaster as being 
sooner or later inevitable. The War Lord and 
the Prussian military caste may have been 
fighting for the mere maintenance of their power, 
but large and intelligent sections of German 
society have acted under the persuasion of a 
political philosophy which was none the less 
sincerely held because we believed it to be wrong. 
In this War German anticipations have proved 
wrong in many regards, but that has been be- 
cause we have made them so by a few wise 
principles of government, and by strenuous 
effort, notwithstanding our mistakes in policy. 
Our hardest test has yet to come. What degree 
of International Reconstruction is necessary if 
the world is long to remain a safe place for 
democracies? And in regard to the internal 
structure of those democracies, what conditions 
must be satisfied if we are to succeed in harness- 
ing to the heavy plow of Social Reconstruction 
the ideals which have inspired heroism in this 
War? There can be no more momentous ques- 
tions. Shall we succeed in soberly marrying 
our new Idealism to Reality? 



Idealists are the salt of the Earth; without 
them to move us, society would soon stagnate 



SOCIAL MOMENTUM 11 

and civilization fade. Idealism has, however, 
been associated with two very different phases 
of temper. The older idealisms, such as Bud- 
dhism, Stoicism, and Mediaeval Christianity, 
were based on self-denial; the Franciscan Friars 
vowed themselves to Chastity, Poverty, and 
Service. But modern democratic idealism, the 
idealism of the American and French Revolu- 
tions, is based on self-realization. Its aim is 
that every human being shall live a full and 
self-respecting life. According to the preamble 
of the American Declaration of Independence, 
all men are created equal and endowed with the 
rights of liberty and the pursuit of happiness. 
These two tendencies of idealism have corre- 
sponded historically with two developments of 
reality. In older times the power of nature over 
man was still great. Hard reality put limits to 
his ambitions. In other words, the world as a 
whole was poor, and resignation was the only 
general road to happiness. The few could, no 
doubt, obtain some scope in life, but only at the 
cost of the serfdom of the many. Even the so- 
called Democracy of Athens and the Platonic 
Utopia were based on domestic and industrial 
slavery. But the modern world is rich. In no 
small measure man now controls the forces of 
nature, and whole classes, formerly resigned to 
their fate, have become imbued with the idea 



12 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

that with a fairer division of wealth there should 
be a nearer approach to equality of oppor- 
tunity. 

This modern reality of human control over 
nature, apart from which democratic ideals 
would be futile, is not wholly due to the advance 
of scientific knowledge and invention. The 
greater control which man now wields is condi- 
tional, and not absolute like the control of 
nature over man by famine and pestilence. 
Human riches and comparative security are 
based to-day on the division and coordination 
of labor, and on the constant repair of the com- 
plicated plant which has replaced the simple 
tools of primitive society. In other words, the 
output of modern wealth is conditional on the 
maintenance of our social organization and 
capital. Society is a * c going concern," and no 
small part of our well-being may be compared 
with the intangible "goodwill" of a business. 
The owner of a business depends on the habits 
of his customers no less than on the regular run- 
ning of the machinery in his factory; both must 
be kept in repair, and when in repair they have 
the value of the " going concern"; but should the 
business stop, they have merely a break-up 
value — the machinery becomes so much scrap 
metal, and the goodwill is reduced to the book 
debts. 



SOCIAL MOMENTUM 13 

Society reposes on the fact that man is a 
creature of habit. By interlocking the various 
habits of many men, society obtains a structure 
which may be compared with that of a running 
machine. Mrs. Bouncer was able to form a 
simple society for the occupation of a room, be- 
cause Box slept by night and Cox by day, but 
her society was dislocated when one of her 
lodgers took a holiday, and for the nonce 
changed his habit. Let any one try to realize 
what would happen to himself if all those on 
whom he depends — the postmen, railwaymen, 
butchers, bakers, printers, and very many others 
— were suddenly to vary their settled routines; 
he will then begin to appreciate in how great a 
degree the power of modern man over nature is 
due to the fact that society is a "going concern," 
or, in the language of the engineer, has momen- 
tum. Stop the running long enough to throw 
men's habits out of gear with one another, and 
society would quickly run down to the simple 
reality of control by nature. Vast numbers 
would die in consequence. 

Productive power, in short, is a far more im- 
portant element of reality in relation to modern 
civilization than is accumulated wealth. The 
total visible wealth of a civilized country, not- 
withstanding the antiquity of some of its treas- 
ures, is generally estimated as equal to the out- 



14 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

put of not more than seven or eight years. The 
significance of this statement does not lie in its 
precise accuracy, but in the rapid growth of its 
practical meaning for modern men, owing to 
their dependence on a machinery of production, 
mechanical and social, which in the past four 
or five generations has become increasingly 
delicate and complicated. For every advance 
in the application of science there has been a 
corresponding change in social organization. It 
was by no mere coincidence that Adam Smith 
was discussing the division of labor when James 
Watt was inventing the steam-engine. Nor, in 
our own time, is it by blind coincidence that be- 
side the invention of the internal combustion 
engine — the key to the motor-car, submarine, 
and aeroplane — must be placed an unparalleled 
extension of the credit system. Lubrication of 
metal machinery depends on the habits of living 
men. The assumption of some scientific enthu- 
siasts that the study of the humane arts has 
ceased to be important will not bear examination; 
the management of men, high and low, is more 
difficult and more important under the condi- 
tions of modern reality than it ever was. 

We describe the managers of the social machine 
as Organizers, but under that general term are 
commonly included two distinct categories. In 
the first place, we have Administrators, who are 



SOCIAL MOMENTUM 15 

not strictly organizers at all — begetters, that 
is to say, of new organs in an organism. It is 
the function of the administrator to keep the 
running social machine in repair and to see to 
its lubrication. When men die, or for reasons of 
ill-health or old age retire, it is his duty to fill 
the vacant places with men suitably trained 
beforehand. A foreman of works is essentially 
an administrator. A Judge administers the 
Law, except in so far as in fact, though not in 
theory, he may make it. In the work of the 
administrator, pure and simple, there is no idea 
of progress. Given a certain organization, 
efficiency is his ideal — perfect smoothness of 
working. His characteristic disease is called 
"Red Tape." A complicated society, well ad- 
ministered, tends in fact to a Chinese stagnation 
by the very strength of its momentum. The 
goodwill of a long-established and well-managed 
business may often be sold for a large sum in the 
market. Perhaps the most striking illustration 
of social momentum is to be seen in the im- 
mobility of markets themselves. Every seller 
wishes to go where buyers are in the habit of 
congregating in order that he may be sure of a 
purchaser for his wares. On the other hand, 
every buyer goes, if he can, to the place where 
sellers are wont to assemble in order that he 
may buy cheaply as the result of their competi- 



1G DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

tion. The authorities have often tried in vain 
to decentralize the markets of London. 

In order to appreciate the other type of 
organizer, the Creator of social mechanism, let 
us again consider for a moment the common 
course of Revolutions. A Voltaire criticises the 
running concern known as French Government; 
a Rousseau paints the ideal of a happier society; 
the authors of the great Encyclopedie prove that 
the material bases for such a society exist. 
Presently the new ideas take possession of some 
well-meaning enthusiasts — inexperienced, how- 
ever, in the difficult art of changing the habits 
of average mankind. They seize an opportunity 
for altering the structure of French society. 
Incidentally, but unfortunately, they slow down 
its running. Stoppage of work, actual breakage 
of the implements of production and govern- 
ment, removal of practiced administrators, and 
substitution of misfitting amateurs combine to 
reduce the rate of production of the necessaries 
of life, with the result that prices rise, and con- 
fidence and credit fall. The Revolutionary 
leaders are, no doubt, willing enough to be poor 
for a time in order to realize their ideals, but 
the hungry millions rise up around them. To 
gain time the millions are led to suspect that the 
shortage is due to some interference of the de- 
posed powers, and the Terror inevitably follows. 



SOCIAL MOMENTUM 17 

At last men become fatalists, and, abandoning 
ideals, seek some organizer who shall restore 
efficiency. The necessity is reinforced by the 
fact that foreign enemies are invading the na- 
tional territory, and that less production and 
relaxed discipline have reduced the defensive 
power of the State. But the organizer needed 
for the task of reconstruction is no mere adminis- 
trator; he must be able to design and make, and 
not merely to repair and lubricate social machin- 
ery. So Carnot, who "organizes victory," and 
Napoleon with his Code Civil, win eternal fame 
by creative effort. 

The possibility of organization in the con- 
structive sense depends on discipline. Running 
society is constituted by the myriad inter- 
locking of the different habits of many men; if 
the running social structure is to be altered, 
even in some relatively small respect, a great 
number of men and women must simultaneously 
change various of their habits in complementary 
ways. It was impossible to introduce Day- 
light Saving except by an edict of Government, 
for any partial adherence to the change of hour 
would have thrown society into confusion. The 
achievement of Daylight Saving was, therefore, 
dependent on social discipline, which is thus 
seen to consist not in the habits of men but in 
the power of simultaneous and correlated change 



18 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

of those habits. In an ordered State the sense of 
discipline becomes innate, and the police are 
but rarely called upon to enforce it. In other 
words, social discipline, or the alteration of 
habit at will or command, itself becomes a 
habit. Military discipline, in so far as it con- 
sists of single acts at the word of command, is 
of a simpler order, but the professional soldier 
knows well the difference between habitual 
discipline and even the most intelligent fighting 
by quick-trained men. 

In times of disorder the interlocking of pro- 
ductive habits breaks down step by step, and 
society as a whole becomes progressively poor, 
though robbers of one kind or another may for 
a while enrich themselves. Even more serious, 
however, is the failure of the habit of discipline, 
for that implies the loss of the power of recupera- 
tion. Consider to what a pass Russia was 
brought by a year of cumulative revolutions; 
her condition was like that terrible state of 
paralysis when the mind still sees and directs, 
but the nerves fail to elicit any response from 
the muscles. A nation does not die when so 
smitten, but the whole mechanism of its society 
must be reconstituted, and that quickly, if the 
men and women who survive its impoverish- 
ment are not to forget the habits and lose the 
aptitudes on which their civilization depends. 



SOCIAL MOMENTUM 19 

History shows no remedy but force upon which 
to found a fresh nucleus of discipline in such 
circumstances ; but the organizer who rests upon 
force tends inevitably to treat the recovery of 
mere efficiency as his end. Idealism does not 
flourish under his rule. It was because history 
speaks plainly in this regard, that so many of 
the idealists of the last two generations have 
been internationalist; the military recovery of 
discipline is commonly achieved either by con- 
quest from another national base or incidentally 
to a successful national resistance to foreign 
invasion. 

The great organizer is the great realist. Not 
that he lacks imagination — very far from that; 
but his imagination turns to " ways and means," 
and not to elusive ends. His is the mind of 
Martha and not of Mary. If he be a Captain 
of Industry the counters of his thought are 
labor and capital; if he be a General of Armies 
they are units and supplies. His organizing is 
aimed at intermediate ends — money if he be an 
industrial, and victory if he be a soldier. But 
money and victory are merely the keys to ul- 
terior ends, and those ulterior ends remain 
elusive for him throughout. He dies still mak- 
ing money, or, if he be a victorious soldier, weeps 
like Alexander because there are no more 
worlds to conquer. His one care is that the 



20 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

business or the army which he has organized 
shall be efficiently administered; he is hard on 
his administrators. Above all, he values the 
habit of discipline; his machine must answer 
promptly to the lever. 

The organizer inevitably comes to look upon 
men as his tools. His is the inverse of the mind 
of the idealist, for he would move men in bri- 
gades and must therefore have regard to mate- 
rial limitations, whereas the idealist appeals to 
the soul in each of us, and souls are winged and 
can soar. It does not follow that the organizer 
is careless of the well-being of the society be- 
neath him; on the contrary, he regards that 
society as so much man-power to be maintained 
in efficient condition. This is true whether he be 
militarist or capitalist, provided that he be far- 
sighted. In the sphere of politics the organizer 
views men as existing for the State — for the 
"Leviathan" of the Stuart philosopher Hobbes. 
But the Democratic Idealist barely tolerates the 
State as a necessary evil, for it limits freedom. 

In the established Democracies of the West, 
the ideals of Freedom have been transmuted 
into the prejudices of the average citizen, and 
it is on these " habits of thought " that the secu- 
rity of our freedom depends, rather than on the 
passing ecstasies of idealism. For a thousand 
years such prejudices took root under the insu- 



SOCIAL MOMENTUM 21 

lar protection of Britain; they are the outcome 
of continuous experiment, and must be treated 
at least with respect, unless we are prepared to 
think of our forefathers as fools. One of these 
prejudices is that it is unwise to take an Expert 
as Minister of State. In the present time of 
War, when freedom even in a democracy must 
yield to efficiency, there are those who would 
have us say that the experts whom we have for 
the time being installed in some of the high offices 
should be succeeded henceforth by experts, and 
that our prejudice is antiquated. None the less 
even in war time Britain has returned to a 
Civilian Minister for War! The fact is, of 
course, that the inefficiencies of the normally 
working British Constitution are merely the 
obverse of the truth that democracy is incom- 
patible with the organization necessary for war 
against autocracies. When the present Chilian 
Minister first came to England he was enter- 
tained by some members of the House of Com- 
mons. Referring to the Mother of Parliaments, 
as seen from the far Pacific, and to the chronic 
grumbling in regard to Parliamentary govern- 
ment which he found on his arrival in London, 
he exclaimed, " You forget that one of the chief 
functions of Parliaments is to prevent things 
being done!" 

The thought of the organizer is essentially 



n DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

strategical, whereas that of the true democrat 
is ethical. The organizer is thinking how to use 
men; but the democrat is thinking of the rights 
of men, which rights are so many rocks in the 
way of the organizer. Undoubtedly the organ- 
izer must be a master, for, given the wayward- 
ness of human nature and the inveteracy of 
habit, he would make little progress otherwise. 
But he is a bad supreme master, because of his 
" ways and means " mind. 

The Nemesis of democratic idealism, if it 
break from the bonds of reality, is the supreme 
rule of the organizer and of blind efficiency. 
The organizer begins innocently enough; his 
executive mind revolts from the disorder, and 
above all from the indiscipline around him. 
Soldierly efficiency undoubtedly saved Revolu- 
tionary France. But such is the impetus of the 
going concern, that it sweeps forward even its 
own creator. To improve the efficiency of his 
man-power he must in the end seek to control 
all its activities — working and thinking, no less 
than fighting. He is in supreme command, and 
inefficiency is pain to him. Therefore Napoleon 
added to his Grand Army and his Code Civil, 
also his Concordat with the Papacy, whereby 
the priest was to become his servant. He might 
have enjoyed lasting peace after the Treaty of 
Amiens, but must needs continue to prepare 



SOCIAL MOMENTUM 23 

war. Finally he was impelled to his Moscow, 
just as a great money maker will overreach him- 
self and end in bankruptcy. 

Bismarck was the Napoleon of the Prussians, 
their man of blood and iron, yet he differed from 
his French prototype in certain regards which, 
for our present purpose, are worth attention. 
His end was unlike the end of Napoleon. There 
was no banishment to Elba after a Moscow, no 
imprisonment in St. Helena after a Waterloo. 
True that, after thirty years at the helm, the 
old pilot was dropped in 1890 by a new captain 
with a mind to piracy, but it was because of his 
caution and not because of vaulting ambition. 
Both Napoleon and Bismarck had supreme 
minds of the " ways and means " order, but there 
was something more in Bismarck. He was not 
merely the great business man, which is Emer- 
son's description of Napoleon. No statesman 
ever adjusted war to policy with a nicer judg- 
ment than Bismarck. He fought three short 
and successful campaigns, and made three 
treaties of peace, from each of which ensued a 
harvest of advantage to Prussia. Yet what 
different treaties they were! After the War of 
1864 against Denmark, Bismarck took Schleswig 
and Holstein, with the idea, beyond question, 
of a Kiel Canal. After the War of 1866 against 
Austria he refused to take Bohemia, and thereby 



U DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

so offended his King that they were not fully 
reconciled until after the victories of 1870. 
There can be no doubt that in this clemency 
Bismarck foresaw a time when Prussia might 
need the alliance of Austria. In 1871, after 
Sedan and the Siege of Paris, Bismarck yielded 
to the pressure of the military party, and took 
Lorraine as well as Alsace. 

The great Chancellor had, in truth, what the 
Prussian, as a rule, lacks, an insight into the 
minds of other nations than his own. His meth- 
ods were psychological by preference. Once he 
had achieved German unity under Prussia, he 
waged no more wars. Yet he accomplished 
great things — for a time he ruled Europe — and 
his method was no mere exploitation of military 
prestige. At the Berlin Congress of 1878 he 
secured the occupation of the provinces of 
Bosnia and Herzegovina for Austria, and thereby 
deepened the rivalry of Austria and Russia in 
the Balkan Peninsula. At the same Berlin Con- 
gress he privately incited France to occupy 
Tunis, and when France presently effected that 
occupation, Italy, as he foresaw, was sharply 
wounded. The Dual Alliance with Austria 
followed in 1879, and the Triple Alliance with 
Austria and Italy in 1881. It was as though he 
had sent his sheep-dog round his flock to drive 
his sheep to him. By subtleties of the same 



SOCIAL MOMENTUM 25 

order he antagonized France and Britain, and 
also Britian and Russia. So, too, did he deal 
in his domestic policy. In 1886 he ceased from 
struggling with the Vatican, and brought over 
the Catholic party to his support, thereby neu- 
tralizing the socialist tendency in the industrial 
but Catholic Province of the Rhineland, and 
the particularist tendency in the Catholic king- 
dom of Bavaria in the south. 

The true parallel is to be drawn not be- 
tween Napoleon and Bismarck, but between 
Napoleon and the entire Prussian ruling caste. 
The end of that caste, which we are now wit- 
nessing, is like the end of Napoleon; the blindly 
organizing man goes to his Moscow, and the 
blindly organizing State to its Armageddon. 
Kultur is the name given to that philosophy 
and education which imbued a whole race with 
the " ways and means " mind. The French are 
an artistic, and therefore an idealistic people; 
Napoleon prostituted their idealism with the 
glory of his genius. Bismarck, on the other 
hand, was the child of materialistic Kultur, but, 
greater than the average of his race, he could 
reckon also with spiritual forces. 

Kultur had its origin not in the victories of 
Frederick the Great, but in the defeat of Jena. 
The rule of Frederick in the eighteenth century 
was a personal rule like that of Napoleon, 



26 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

whereas the Prussia of the nineteenth century, 
behind whatever other pretense, was governed 
by an oligarchy of intellectual "Experts" — staff 
officers, bureaucrats, professors. Frederick, sole 
organizer, raised only administrators, with the 
result that when he died he left Prussia a mere 
mechanism, to be broken on the field of Jena. 
In the very winter of Jena the philosopher 
Fichte came to lecture in Berlin, while it was 
still in the occupation of the French. 1 There 
was no University in the Prussian capital of 
those days, and the lectures were delivered not 
to young students, but to the maturest brains 
of the country in the fever of a great crisis. 
Fichte taught the philosophy of Patriotism at a 
time when the German Universities were devoted 
to the abstract worship of knowledge and art. 
In the next few years, between 1806 and 1813, 
was established that close connection between 
the army, the bureaucracy, and the schools, 
or, in other words, between the needs of govern- 
ment and the aims of education, which consti- 
tuted the essence and perverse strength of the 
Prussian system. Universal military service 
was correlated with universal compulsory school- 
ing, inaugurated in Prussia two generations be- 
fore the English Education Act of 1870; the 

1 See The Evolution of Prussia, by Marriott and Grant Robertson. 
Clarendon Press, 1915. 



SOCIAL MOMENTUM 27 

University of Berlin, with a brilliant profes- 
soriate, was established as sister to the Great 
General Staff. Thus knowledge in Prussia was 
no longer pursued mainly for its own sake, but 
as a means to an end, and that end was the 
success of a State which had experienced bitter 
disaster. It was a Camp-State, moreover, in 
the midst of a plain, without the natural bul- 
warks of a Spain, a France, or a Britian. The 
end determines the means, and since the Prus- 
sian end was military strength, based of neces- 
sity on stark discipline, the means were inevit- 
ably materialistic. Judged from the standpoint 
of Berlin, it was a wonderful thing to have 
impressed Kultur, or Strategical mentality, on 
the educated class of a whole people, but from 
the standpoint of civilization at large it was a 
fatal momentum to have given to a nation — 
fatal, that is to say, in the long run, either to 
civilization or that nation. 

We have had for a byword in these times the 
German war map. It may be questioned, how- 
ever, whether most people in Britain and Amer- 
ica have fully realized the part played by the 
map in German education during the past three 
generations. Maps are the essential apparatus 
of Kultur, and every educated German is a 
geographer in a sense that is true of very few 
Englishmen or Americans. He has been taught 



28 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

to see in maps not merely the conventional 
boundaries established by scraps of paper, but 
permanent physical opportunities — "ways and 
means" in the literal sense of the words. His 
Real-Politik lives in his mind upon a mental map. 
The serious teaching of geography in German 
High Schools and Universities dates from the 
very beginning of Kultur. It was organized in 
the generation after Jena, mainly by the labors 
of four men — Alexander von Humboldt, Berg- 
haus, Carl Hitter, and Stieler — who were at- 
tached to the new University of Berlin and to 
the since famous map-house of Perthes of Gotha. 
To this day, notwithstanding all that has been 
done by two or three exceptional map-houses in 
this country, if you want a good map, convey- 
ing accurately and yet graphically the funda- 
mental contrasts, you must have resort as often 
as not to one of German origin. The reason is 
that in Germany there are many cartographers 
who are scholarly geographers and not merely 
surveyors or draftsmen. They can exist, be- 
cause there is a wide public educated to appre- 
ciate and pay for intelligently drawn maps. 1 

In this country we value the moral side of 
education, and it is perhaps intuitively that we 

1 In my Address to the Geographical Section of the British Association 
at Ipswich in 1895 will be found an account of the rise of the German 
schools of geography. 



SOCIAL MOMENTUM 29 

have neglected materialistic geography. Be- 
fore the War not a few teachers, within my 
knowledge, objected to geography as a subject 
of education, on the ground that it tended to 
promote Imperialism, just as they objected to 
physical drill because it tended to militarism. 
We may laugh at such excesses of political cau- 
tion, as men of former centuries scoffed at the 
anchorites who secreted themselves from the 
world, but the protest in each case was against 
an excess in the opposite direction. 

Berlin-Bagdad, Berlin-Herat, Berlin-Pekin — 
not heard as mere words, but visualized on the 
mental relief map — involve for most Anglo- 
Saxons a new mode of thought, lately and 
imperfectly introduced among us by the rough 
maps of the newspapers. But your Prussian, 
and his father, and his grandfather have debated 
such concepts all their lives, pencil in hand. In 
arranging the detailed terms of peace, our states- 
men will, no doubt, have the advice of excellent 
geographical experts, but the German repre- 
sentatives will have behind them not merely a 
few experts but a great geographically instructed 
public, long familar with every important as- 
pect of the questions which will arise, and quick 
to give a farsighted support to their leaders. 
This may easily become a decisive advantage, 
especially should our people pass into a magnani- 



30 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

mous frame of mind. It would be a curious 
thing if the successes of Talleyrand and Metter- 
nich, in the secret diplomacy of 1814, were 
repeated by the spokesmen of the defeated 
States of our own time under the conditions 
imposed upon diplomacy by popular govern- 
ment! 1 

The map habit of thought is no less preg- 
nant in the sphere of economics than it is in 
that of strategy. True that Laissez-faire had 
little use for it, but the "most favored nation'' 
clause which Germany imposed on defeated 
France in the Treaty of Frankfurt had quite a 
different meaning for the strategical German 
mind to that which was attached to it by honest 
Cobdenites. The German bureaucrat built upon 
it a whole structure of preferences for Ger- 
man trade. Of what use to Britain under her 
northern skies was the most favored nation 
clause when Germany granted a concession to 
Italy in the matter of import duties on olive- 
oil? Would there not also be railway trucks 
to be returned to Italy which might as well 
return loaded with German exports? The 

1 It is true that there is a ** horse-sense'* of geography among those of 
us who have traveled. It is true, also, that we keep atlases in our 
offices and libraries, to be consulted as we would consult a dictionary 
for the spelling of a word. But correct spelling does not always imply 
literary power! A trained sense of geographical perspective is essential 
to the mode of thought here in question. 



SOCIAL MOMENTUM 31 

whole system of most voluminous and intricate 
commercial treaties between Germany and her 
neighbors was based on a minute study of com- 
mercial routes and of the lie of productive areas. 
The German official was thinking in the concrete 
detail of "living," while his British counterpart 
was absorbed in the negative principle of "let- 
ting live." 



Kaiser Wilhelm told us that this War was a 
struggle between two views of the world. 
"View" is characteristic of the organizer; he sees 
things from above. Kipling agreed with the 
Kaiser, but in the language of simple men below, 
when he declared that there is human feeling 
and German feeling. The organizer, as organ- 
izer, is inevitably inhuman, or rather unhuman. 
No doubt both Kaiser and poet exaggerated in 
order to emphasize opposing tendencies; even a 
democracy must have organizers, just as there 
must be some remnant of kindliness even 
among the students of Kultur. The real ques- 
tion is as to which shall have the last word in 
the State — the idealists or the organizers. In- 
ternationalists are in futile revolt against all 
organization when they would have war of the 
proletariat on the bourgeoisie. 

Democracy refuses to think strategically un- 



32 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

less and until compelled to do so for purposes of 
defense. That, of course, does not prevent 
democracy from declaring war for an ideal, as 
was seen during the French Revolution. One 
of the inconsistencies of our pacifists to-day is 
that they so often urge intervention in the af- 
fairs of other nations. In the Middle Ages vast 
unorganized crowds set out to march against 
the infidel and perished recklessly by the way. 
It was not from lack of warning that the West- 
ern democracies were unprepared for the pres- 
ent War. At the same moment, early in this 
century, to cite only the case of Great Britain, 
three honored voices were appealing to our 
sovereign people and were not heard: Lord 
Rosebery called for efficiency, Mr. Chamber- 
lain for economic defense, and Lord Roberts 
for military training. Democracy implies rule 
by consent of the average citizen, who does not 
view things from the hill-tops, for he must be 
at his work in the fertile plains. There is no 
good in railing at the characteristics of popular 
government, for they are its qualities and no 
mere defects. President Wilson admits them 
when he says we must make the world a safe 
place henceforth for democracies. They were 
no less admitted in the British House of Com- 
mons when responsible Ministers took pride in 
the fact that, save in respect of the defensive 



SOCIAL MOMENTUM 33 

force of the Navy, we were not prepared for 
the War. 

The democrat thinks in principles, be they 
— according to his idiosyncrasy — ideals, prej- 
udices, or economic laws. The organizer, on 
the other hand, plans construction, and, like 
an architect, must consider the ground for his 
foundations and the materials with which he 
will build. It must be concrete and detailed 
consideration, for bricks may be most suitable 
for his walls, but stone for his lintels, and tim- 
ber and slate for his roof. If it be a State which 
he is erecting — not, be it noted, a nation which 
is growing — he must carefully consider the 
territory which it is desirable to occupy and the 
social structures — not economic laws — which 
are to his hand as the result of history. So he 
opposes his strategy to the ethics of the democrat. 

Fierce moralists allow no extenuation for sin 
however persistent the temptation, and great 
undoubtedly must be the reward in heaven for 
the slum-dweller who "keeps straight." But 
practical reformers give much of their thought 
to the Housing problem! Of late our political 
moralists have been very fierce. They preached 
the narrow way of "no annexations, no indem- 
nities." In other words, they refused to reckon 
with the realities of geography and economics. 
Had we but faith as a grain of mustard seed in 



34 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

average human nature, could we not remove 
the mountains! 

Practical sense, however, warns us that it 
would be wise to seize the present opportunity, 
when for once the democratic nations are 
efficiently armed, to make the world a safe 
place for democracies when going about their 
ordinary business. In other words, we must 
see to the housing problem of our coming 
League of Nations. We must reckon pre- 
sciently with the realities of space and time, and 
not be content merely to lay down on paper 
good principles of conduct. The good may not 
always appear the same even to those who are 
now Allies, and will pretty surely appear not 
good, for a time at least, to our present enemies. 

"No annexations, no indemnities" was no 
doubt a rallying cry not meant by its authors 
to support existing tyrannies. But it is surely 
legitimate to remark that there is a wide differ- 
ence between the attitude of the lawyer with 
his presumptions unless there be proof to the 
contrary, and that of the business man untied 
by formulae. The one does things, and the other, 
at best, allows them to be done. 

In the past, democracy has looked with sus- 
picion on the activities even of popular govern- 
ments, and therein has shown a wise self-knowl- 
edge. It used to be thought, and sooner or 



SOCIAL MOMENTUM 35 

later will be thought again, that the main 
function of the State in free countries is to pre- 
vent tyrannous things from being done whether 
by offenders at home or invaders from abroad. 
Average citizenship is not a likely base for 
daring innovations. Adventurers, sole or cor- 
porate, must therefore be left to blaze the way 
to progress. In military and bureaucratic 
States it is otherwise; Napoleon could be a 
pioneer, as might have been Joseph II. if his 
conservative subjects had not successfully re- 
volted against him. In Prussia all progress has 
been State-engineered, but then progress there 
has meant merely increase of efficiency. 1 

To save democracy, however, in its recent 
jeopardy we suspended the very safeguards of 
democracy, and allowed our governments to 
organize us not merely for defense but for 
offense. Had the War been short, this would 
have been a mere parenthesis in history. But 
it has been long, and social structures have 
wasted in part, and in part have been diverted 
to new uses, so that habits and vested interests 
have dissolved, and all society is as clay in our 
hands, if only we have the cunning to mold it 
while it is still yielding. But the art of the clay- 
molder, as of the worker in hot metal, lies not 

1 Twelve years ago I met a Prussian Staff Officer who told me that 
he spent his life trying to save half an hour on mobilization. 



36 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

merely in knowing what he would make, but 
also in allowing for the properties of the material 
in which he is working. He must not only have 
artistic aims, but also technical knowledge; his 
human initiative must reckon with reality; he 
must cultivate his "ways and means" mind, 
while he tries to retain his ideals of form. 

As the artist endeavors to his dying day to 
learn ever more about the medium in which he 
works — and not merely more in a scientific 
sense, but in a practical "tactile" way, gaining, 
as we say, greater command over his material 
— so has it been with the knowledge of humanity 
at large in regard to the Realities of the round 
world on which we must practice the intricate 
art of living together. It is not merely that we 
have amassed vast encyclopaedias of fact, but 
that, as we live through each new epoch, we 
see all the past and all the present with new eyes 
and from new standpoints. It is obvious that 
these four years of war have wrought a change 
in human outlook the like of which was not 
effected in all the previous life of those of us 
who have gray hairs. Yet, when we look back 
with our present knowledge, is it not clear that 
the currents of thought now running so tumul- 
tuously were already setting in gently some 
twenty years ago? In the last years of last cen- 
tury and the first of this, the organizers at 



SOCIAL MOMENTUM 37 

Berlin and the minorities in London and Paris 
had already discerned the new drift of the 
straws. 1 

I propose trying to depict some of the Real- 
ities, geographical and economic, in their twen- 
tieth-century perspective. The facts will most 
of them be old and familiar. But, in the lan- 
guage of the Mediaeval schoolmen, there is a 
great difference between Vera causa and Causa 
causans — mere academic learning and the real- 
ization which impels to action. 

1 Mr. Chamberlain resigned from the Cabinet in order to free himself 
as a leader in September, 1903, and Lord Roberts resigned from Com- 
mander-in-Chief with a similar idea in January, 1904. 



Ill 

THE SEAMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 

" And God said, Let the waters be gathered together 
in one place " 

The physical facts of geography have remained 
substantially the same during the fifty or sixty 
centuries of recorded human history. Forests 
have been cut down, marshes have been drained, 
and deserts may have broadened, but the out- 
lines of land and water, and the lie of moun- 
tains and rivers have not altered except in de- 
tail. The influence of geographical conditions 
upon human activities has depended, however, 
not merely on the realities as we now know 
them to be and to have been, but in even greater 
degree on what men imagined in regard to them. 
The ocean has been one throughout history, 
but for effective human purposes there were 
two oceans, Western and Eastern, until the 
Cape of Good Hope was rounded only four hun- 
dred years ago. So did it happen that Admiral 
Mahan in the closing years of last century could 
still base a new message in regard to sea-power 
on a text from the first chapter of Genesis. The 
ocean was one ocean all the time, but the prac- 



THE SEAMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 39 

tical meaning of that great reality was not 
wholly understood until a few years ago — per- 
haps it is only now being grasped in its entirety. 
Each century has had its own geographical 
perspective. Men still living, though past the 
age of military service, were taught from a map 
of the world on which nearly all the interior of 
Africa was a blank; yet last year General Smuts 
could address the Royal Geographical Society 
on the German ambition to control the world 
from the now explored vantage-ground of Cen- 
tral Africa. The geographical perspective of 
the twentieth century differs, however, from 
that of all the previous centuries in more than 
mere extension. In outline our geographical 
knowledge is now complete. We have lately 
attained to the North Pole, and have found 
that it is in the midst of a deep sea, and to the 
South Pole, and have found it upon a high 
plateau. With those final discoveries the book 
of the pioneers has been closed. No consider- 
able fertile new land, no important mountain- 
range, and no first-class river can any more be 
the reward of adventure. Moreover, the map 
of the world had hardly been sketched before 
claims to the political ownership of all the dry 
land had been pegged out. Whether we think 
of the physical, economic, military, or political 
interconnection of things on the surface of the 



40 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

globe, we are now for the first time presented 
with a closed system. The known does not fade 
any longer through the half-known into the 
unknown; there is no longer elasticity of political 
expansion in lands beyond the Pale. Every 
shock, every disaster or superfluity, is now felt 
even to the antipodes, and may indeed return 
from the antipodes, as the air waves from the 
eruption of the volcano Krakatoa in the year 
1883 were propelled in rings over the globe un- 
til they converged to a point in the opposite 
hemisphere, and thence diverged again to meet 
once more over Krakatoa, the seat of their 
origin. Every deed of humanity will henceforth 
be echoed and reechoed in like manner round 
the world. That, in the ultimate analysis, is 
why every considerable State was bound to be 
drawn into the recent War, if it lasted, as it 
did last, long enough. 

To this day, however, our view of the geo- 
graphical realities is colored for practical pur- 
poses by our preconceptions from the past. In 
other words, human society is still related to 
the facts of geography not as they are, but in 
no small measure as they have been approached 
in the course of history. It is only with an 
effort that we can yet realize them in the true, 
the complete, and therefore detached, perspec- 
tive of the twentieth century. This War has 



THE SEAMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 41 

taught us rapidly, but there are still vast num- 
bers of our citizens who look out on to a vivid 
Western foreground, but only to a very dim 
Eastern background. In order therefore to 
appreciate where we now stand, it will be worth 
while to consider shortly the stages by which we 
have arrived. Let us begin with the succeed- 
ing phases of the seaman's outlook. 



Imagine a vast tawny desert, raised a few 
hundred feet above the sea level. Imagine a 
valley with precipitous rocky slopes trenched 
into this desert plateau, and the floor of the 
valley carpeted with a strip of black soil, through 
the midst of which winds northward for five 
hundred miles a silvery navigable river. That 
river is the Nile flowing from where the granite 
rocks of Assouan break its navigability at the 
first cataract to where its waters divide at the 
head of the Delta. From desert edge to desert 
edge across the valley is a crow-fly distance of 
some ten or twenty miles. Stand on one of the 
brinks with the desert behind you; the rocky 
descent falls from your feet to the strip of plain 
below, and away over the floods of the summer- 
time, or the green of the growing winter-time, 
or the golden harvests of the spring, you are 
faced by the opposing wall of rock rising to the 



42 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 



other desert. The recesses in those rock fronts 
were carved long ago into cavernous temples 
and tombs, and the salients into mighty effigies 
of kings and gods. Egypt, in this long sunken 
belt, was anciently civilized because all the essen- 
tial physical ad- 
vantages were here 
combined for men 
to work upon. On 
the one hand were 
a rich soil, abun- 
dant water, and a 
powerful sunshine; 
hence fertility for 
the support of a 
population in afflu- 
ence. On the other 
hand was a smooth 
waterway within 
half a dozen miles 
or less of every 
field in the coun- 
try. There was also motive power for shipping, 
since the river-current carried vessels northward, 
and the Etesian winds — known on the ocean as 
the trade winds — brought them southward again. 
Fertility and a line of communications — man- 
power and facilities for its organization; there 
are the essential ingredients for a kingdom. 




Fig. 1. — A river- world apart. 



THE SEAMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 



43 



We are asked to picture the early condition 
of Egypt as that of a valley held by a chain of 
tribes, who fought with one another in fleets 
of great war-canoes, just 
as later tribes have fought 
on the river Congo in our 
own time. Some one of 
these tribes, having de- 
feated its neighbors, gained 
possession of a longer sec- 
tion of the valley, a more 
extensive material basis for 
its man-power, and on that 
basis organized further con- 
quests. At last the whole 
length of the valley was 
brought under a single rule, 
and the kings of all Egypt 
established their palace at FlG . 2> _ A coastal naviga _ 

Thebes. Northward and tion drawn to the same 
Southward, by boat On the «eale as the river naviga- 
, _ . . tion opposite. 

Nile, traveled their admin- 
istrators — their messengers and their magis- 
trates. Eastward and westward lay the strong 
defense of the deserts, and at the northern limit, 
against the sea pirates, a belt of marsh round 
the shore of the Delta. 1 

Now carry your mind to the "Great Sea," the 

1 See The Davm of History, by Professor J. L. Myres. 




44 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

Mediterranean. You have there essentially the 
same physical ingredients as in Egypt but on a 
larger scale, and you have based upon them not 
a mere kingdom but the Roman Empire. 
From the Phoenician coast for two thousand 
miles westward lies the broad water way to its 
mouth at Gibraltar, and on either hand are 
fertile shorelands with winter rains and harvest 
sunshine. But there is a distinction to be made 
between the dwellers along the Nile banks and 
those along the Mediterranean shores. The 
conditions of human activity are relatively 
uniform in all parts of Egypt; each of the con- 
stituent tribes would have its farmers and its 
boatmen. But the races round the Mediter- 
ranean became specialized; some were content to 
till their fields and navigate their rivers at home, 
but others gave most of their energy to seaman- 
ship and foreign commerce. Side by side, for 
instance, dwelt the home-staying, corn-growing 
Egyptians and the adventurous Phoenicians. A 
longer and more sustained effort of organization 
was therefore needed to weld all the kingdoms of 
the Mediterranean into a single political unit. 

Modern research has made it plain that the 
leading seafaring race of antiquity came at all 
times from that square of water between Europe 
and Asia which is known alternatively as the 
iEgean Sea and the Archipelago, the "Chief 



THE SEAMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 45 

Sea" of the Greeks. Sailors from this sea would 
appear to have taught the Phoenicians their 
trade in days when as yet Greek was not spoken 
in the "Isles of the Gentiles." It is of deepest 
interest for our present purpose to note that 
the center of civilization in the pre-Greek world 
of the iEgean, according both to the indications 
of mythology and the recent excavations, was 
in the Island of Crete. Was that the first base 
of sea-power? From that home did the seamen 
fare who, sailing northward, saw the coast of 
the rising sun to their right hand, and of the 
setting sun to their left hand, and named the 
one Asia and the other Europe? Was it from 
Crete that the sea-folk settled round the other 
shores of the Mge&n "sea-chamber," forming to 
this day a coastal veneer of Greek population in 
front of peoples of other race a few miles inland? 
There are so many islands in the Archipelago 
that the name has become, like the Delta of 
Egypt, one of the common descriptive terms of 
geography. But Crete is the largest and most 
fruitful of them. Have we here a first instance 
of the importance of the larger base for sea- 
power? The man-power of the sea must be 
nourished by land-fertility somewhere, and other 
things being equal — such as security of the home 
and energy of the people — that power will control 
the sea which is based on the greater resources. 



46 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

The next phase of Mgeaxi development teaches 
apparently the same lesson. Horse-riding tribes 
of Hellenic speech came down from the north 
into the peninsula which now forms the main- 
land of Greece, and settled, Hellenizing the 
early inhabitants. These Hellenes advanced 
into the terminal limb of the peninsula, the 
Peloponnese, slenderly attached to the con- 
tinent by the isthmus of Corinth. Thence, 
organizing sea-power on their relatively con- 
siderable peninsular base, one of the Hellenic 
tribes, the Dorians, conquered Crete, a smaller 
though completely insular base. 

Some centuries passed, during which the 
Greeks sailed round the southern headlands of 
the Peloponnese into the Ionian Sea, and colo- 
nized along the shores of that sea also. So the 
peninsula came to be a citadel in the midst of 
the Greek sea-world. Along the outer shores 
of the twin waters, Mgeern and Ionian, the 
Greek colonists were but a fringe exposed to 
attack from behind. Only in the central pen- 
insula were they relatively, although as the 
sequel shows not absolutely, safe. 

To the eastern, outer shore of the iEgean the 
Persians came down from the interior against 
the Greek cities by the sea, and the Athenian 
fleet carried aid from the peninsular citadel to 
the threatened kinsfolk over the water, and issue 



48 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

was joined between sea-power and land-power. 
A Persian sea-raid was defeated at Marathon, 
and the Persians then resorted to the obvious 
strategy of baffled land-power; under King 
Xerxes they marched round, throwing a bridge 
of boats over the Dardanelles, and entered the 
peninsula from the north, with the idea of de- 
stroying the nest whence the wasps emerged 
which stung them and flew elusively away. The 
Persian effort failed, and it was reserved for the 
half-Greek, half-barbaric Macedonians, estab- 
lished in the root of the Greek Peninsula itself, 
to end the first cycle of sea-power by conquer- 
ing to south of them the Greek sea-base, and 
then marching into Asia, and through Syria 
into Egypt, and on the way destroying Tyre of 
the Phoenicians. Thus they made a " closed sea " 
of the Eastern Mediterranean by depriving both 
the Greeks and the Phoenicians of their bases. 
That done, the Macedonian King Alexander 
could advance light-heartedly into Upper Asia. 
We may talk of the mobility of ships and of the 
long arm of the fleet, but, after all, sea-power is 
fundamentally a matter of appropriate bases, 
productive and secure. Greek sea-power passed 
through the same phases as Egyptian river- 
power. The end of both was the same; 
without the protection of a navy commerce 
moved securely over a water way because all the 



THE SEAMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 49 

shores were held by one and the same land- 
power. 

Now we go to the Western Mediterranean. 
Rome there began as a fortified town on a hill, 
at the foot of which was a bridge and a river- 
wharf. This hill-bridge-port-town was the cita- 
del and market of a small nation of farmers, who 
tilled Latium, the " broad land " or plain, between 
the Apennines and the sea. " Father " Tiber was 
for shipping purposes merely a creek, navigable 
for the small sea-craft of those days, which 
entered thus from the coast a few miles into the 
midst of the plain, but that was enough to give 
Rome the advantage over her rivals, the towns 
crowning the Alban and Etruscan hills of the 
neighborhood. Rome had the bridge and the 
inmost port just as had London. 

Based on the productivity of Latium, the 
Romans issued from the Tiber to traffic round 
the shores of the Western Mediterrannean. 
Soon they came into competition with the 
Carthaginians, who were based on the fertility 
of the Mejerdeh valley in the opposite promon- 
tory of Africa. The First Punic or Phoenician 
War ensued, and the Romans victoriously held 
the sea. They then proceeded to widen their 
base by annexing all the peninsular part of 
Italy as far as the Rubicon River. 



50 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

In the Second Punic War, the Carthaginian 
general, Hannibal, endeavored to outflank the 
Roman sea-power by marching round it, as 
Xerxes and Alexander had done in regard to the 
sea-powers opposed to them. He carried his 




Fig. 4. — Latium, a fertile sea-base. 

army over the western narrows from Africa into 
Spain, and then advanced through Southern 
Gaul into Italy. He was defeated, and Rome 
annexed the Mediterranean coasts of Gaul and 
Spain. By taking Carthage itself in the Third 
Punic War, she made a "closed sea" of the 
Western Mediterranean, for all the shores were 
held by one and the same land-power. 



THE SEAMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 51 

There remained the task of uniting the con- 
trols of the Western and Eastern basins of the 
Mediterranean, connected by the Sicilian Strait 
and the Strait of Messina. The Roman legions 
passed over into Macedonia and thence into 
Asia, but the distinction between Latin West 
and Greek East remained, as was evident when 
civil war came to be waged between the Roman 
Governors of the West and the East, Caesar and 
Antony. At the sea fight of Actium, one of the 
decisive battles of the world's history, the 
Western fleet of Caesar destroyed the Eastern 
fleet of Antony. Thenceforth for five centuries 
the entire Mediterranean was a " closed sea " ; and 
we think in consequence of the Roman Empire 
as chiefly a land-power. No fleet was needed, 
save a few police vessels, to maintain as com- 
plete a command of the arterial sea-way of the 
Mediterranean as ever the Kings of Egypt 
exercised over their Nile-way. Once more land- 
power terminated a cycle of competition upon 
the water by depriving sea-power of its bases. 
True that there had been the culminating sea 
battle of Actium, and that Caesar's fleet had won 
the reward of all finally successful fleets, the 
command over all the sea. But that command 
was not afterwards maintained upon the sea, 
but upon the land by holding the coasts. 




Fig. 5. — Two famous marches for the purpose of outflanking 




E 9ypt 

sea-power; also a victory which 'closed' the Mediterranean. 



54 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

When Rome had completed the organization 
of her power round the Mediterranean, there 
followed a long transitional epoch, during which 
the oceanic development of Western civiliza- 
tion was gradually preparing. The transition 
began with the Roman road system, con- 
structed for the greater mobility of the march- 
ing legions. 

After the close of the Punic Wars four Latin- 
speaking provinces encircled the Western Med- 
iterranean — Italy, Southern Gaul, Eastern and 
Southern Spain, and Carthaginian Africa. The 
outer boundary of the African province was 
protected by the Sahara Desert, and Italy had 
in rear the Adriatic moat, but in Gaul and Spain 
Rome found herself the uncomfortable neighbor 
of independent Celtic tribes. Thus the familiar 
dilemma of Empire presented itself; to advance 
and end the menace, or to entrench and shut it 
out, but leave it in being. A still virile people 
chose the former course, and the frontier and 
the roads were carried through to the ocean 
along a thousand miles of frontage between 
Cape St. Vincent and the mouths of the 
Rhine. As a consequence the Latin portion 
of the Empire came to be based on two fea- 
tures of Physical Geography: on the one hand 
was the Latin Sea — the Western Mediter- 
ranean; and on the other hand was the Latin 



THE SEAMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 55 

Peninsula, between the Mediterranean and the 
ocean. 1 

Julius Caesar penetrated to the Bay of Biscay, 
and built a fleet wherewith he defeated the fleet 
of the Veneti of Brittany. Then, because the 
Celts of Britain were giving help to their Gallic 
kinsmen, he crossed the Channel and smote 
them in their island base. A hundred years 
later the Romans conquered all the lower and 
more fruitful portion of Britain, and so elimi- 
nated the risk of the rise of a sea-power off the 
Gallic coast. In this way the Channel also be- 
came a "closed sea," controlled by land-power. 

After four centuries the land-power of Rome 
waned, and the seas on either side of the Latin 
Peninsula then soon ceased to be " closed." The 
Norsemen raided over the North Sea from their 
fiords, and through the Channel, and through 
the Straits of Gibraltar, even into the recesses 
of the Mediterranean, enveloping with their 
sea-power the whole great peninsula. They 
seized forward bases in the islands of Britain 
and Sicily, and even nibbled at the mainland 
edges in Normandy and Southern Italy. 

At the same time the Saracen camel-men 
came down from Arabia and took Carthage, 

1 1 do not know whether these names, Latin Sea and Latin Peninsula, 
have been used beforehand. It seems to me that they serve to crystallize 
important generalizations, and I propose using them henceforth. 



56 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

Egypt, and Syria from the Empire — the prov- 
inces, that is to say, south of the Mediterra- 
nean. Then they launched their fleets on the 



^* 




Fig. 6. — The Latin Sea, showing the Roman territory- 
after the Punic Wars. 



water, and seized part of Sicily and part of Spain 
for overseas bases. Thus the Mediterranean 
ceased to be the arterial way of an Empire, and 
became the frontier moat dividing Christendom 
from Islam. But the greater sea-power of the 
Saracens enabled them to hold Spain, though 



THE SEAMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 



57 



north of the water, just as at an earlier time the 
greater sea-power of Rome had enabled her to 
hold Carthage, though south of the water. 




Fig. 7. — The Latin Peninsula, occupied by the 
modern Romance nations. 



For a thousand years Latin Christendom was 
thus imprisoned in the Latin Peninsula and its 
appendant island of Britain. Fifteen hundred 
miles northeastward, measured in a straight 
line, trends the oceanic coast from the Sacred 
Promontory of the ancients to the Straits at 



58 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

Copenhagen, and fifteen hundred miles eastward, 
measured in the same way, lies the sinuous 
Mediterranean coast from the Sacred Promon- 
tory to the Straits at Constantinople. A lesser 
peninsula advances towards the main peninsula 
at each strait, Scandinavia on the one hand, and 
Asia Minor on the other; and behind the land 
bars so formed are two landgirt basins, the 
Baltic and Black Seas. If Britain be considered 
as balancing Italy, the symmetry of the distal 
end of the main peninsula is such that you might 
lay a Latin Cross upon it with the head in Ger- 
many, the arms in Britain and Italy, the feet 
in Spain, and the center in France, thus typify- 
ing that ecclesiastical empire of the five nations 
which, though shifted northward, was the mediae- 
val heir of the Roman Caesars. Towards the 
East, however, where the Baltic and Black 
Seas first begin to define the peninsular char- 
acter of Europe, the outline is less shapely, for 
the Balkan peninsula protrudes southward, 
only tapering finally into the historic little 
peninsula of Greece. 

Is it not tempting to speculate on what might 
have happened had Rome not refused to con- 
quer eastward of the Rhine? Who can say that 
a single mighty sea-power, wholly Latinized as 
far as the Black and Baltic Seas, would not 
have commanded the world from its peninsular 



THE SEAMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 59 

base? But Classical Rome was primarily a 
Mediterranean and not a peninsular power, and 
the Rhine-Danube frontier must be regarded 
as demarking a penetration from the Mediter- 
ranean coast rather than as the incomplete 
achievement of a peninsular policy. 

It was the "opening" again of the seas on 
either hand which first compacted Europe in 
the peninsular sense. Reaction had to be organ- 
ized, or the pressures from north and south 
would have obliterated Christendom. So Char- 
lemagne erected an Empire astride of the Rhine, 
half Latin and half German by speech, but 
wholly Latin ecclesiastically. With this Em- 
pire as base the Crusades were afterwards under- 
taken. Seen in large perspective at this distance 
of time, and from the seaman's point of view, 
the Crusades, if successful, would have had for 
their main effect the "closing" once more of the 
Mediterranean Sea. The long series of these 
wars, extending over two centuries, took two 
courses. On the one hand, fleets were sent out 
from Venice and Genoa to Jaffa and Acre on the 
Syrian coast; on the other hand, armies marched 
through Hungary, along the famous "corridor" 
of the Morava and Maritza valleys, and through 
Constantinople and Asia Minor into Syria. The 
comparison is obvious between these campaigns 
of the Crusaders by land, from a German base 



THE SEAMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 61 

round to the back of the Mediterranean Sea, 
and the similar campaign of Alexander from his 
Macedonian base, A good many parallels might, 
indeed, be drawn between the half-Greek Mace- 
donians and the half -Latin Germans. No Greek 
of the full blood but looked upon a Macedonian 
as a sort of bastard! But his position in the 
broad root of the Greek peninsula enabled the 
Macedonian to conquer the Greek sea-base, as 
the position of the German in the broad root 
of the greater Latin Peninsula has always made 
him dangerous to the Latin Sea bases beyond 
the Rhine and the Alps. 

The peoples of the Latin civilization were 
thus hardened by a winter of centuries, called 
the Dark Ages, during which they were besieged 
in their homeland by the Mohammedans, and 
failed to break out by their Crusading sorties. 
Only in the fifteenth century did Time ripen for 
the great adventure on the ocean which was to 
make the world European. It is worth pausing 
for a moment to consider further the unique 
environment in which the Western strain of our 
human breed developed the enterprise and tenac- 
ity which have given it the lead in the modern 
world. Europe is but a small corner of the 
great island which also contains Asia and Africa, 
but the cradle land of the Europeans was only 
a half of Europe — the Latin Peninsula and the 



m DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

subsidiary peninsulas and islands clustered 
around it. Broad deserts lay to the south, which 
could be crossed only in some three months on 
camel back, so that that the black men were 
fended off from the white men. The trackless 
ocean lay to the west, and to the north the frozen 
ocean. To the northeast were interminable 
pine forests, and rivers flowing either to ice- 
choked mouths in the Arctic Sea or to inland 
waters, such as the Caspian Sea, detached from 
the ocean. Only to the southeast were there 
practicable oasis-routes leading to the outer 
world, but these were closed, more or less com- 
pletely, from the seventh to the nineteenth 
century, by the Arabs and the Turks. 

In any case, however, the European system 
of water ways was detached by the Isthmus of 
Suez from the Indian Ocean. Therefore from 
the seaman's point of view Europe was a quite 
definite conception, even though the landsman 
might think of it as merging with Asia. It was 
a world apart, but within that world was ample 
fertility, and in its water paths a natural pro- 
vision for the intimacy of a family of nations. 
Water paths they were, with branchings and 
crossings, for the boatmen, not venturing out 
on to the high seas, still sailed between the 
coasts and the horizon, just as they threaded 
their way between the two banks of the rivers. 



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64 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

In the relatively roadless days, moreover, which 
followed on the decay of the Roman road system, 
the boatmen frequented many of the head- 
waters of the rivers, which we have now aban- 
doned as no longer worth navigating. 

There were two fortunate circumstances in 
regard to the mediaeval siege of Europe. On the 
one hand, the Infidels had not command of 
inexhaustible man-power, for they were based 
on arid and sub-arid deserts and steppes, and 
on comparatively small oasis-lands; on the other 
hand, the Latin Peninsula was not seriously 
threatened along its oceanic border, for the 
Norsemen, though fierce and cruel while they 
remained Pagan, were based on fiord-valleys 
even less extensive and less fruitful than the 
oases, and wherever they settled — in England, 
Normandy, Sicily, or Russia — their small num- 
bers were soon absorbed into the older popula- 
tions. Thus the whole defensive strength of 
Europe could be thrown against the south- 
eastern danger. But as the European civiliza- 
tion gained momentum, there was energy to 
spare upon the ocean frontage; Venice and 
Austria sufficed for the later struggle against the 
Turks. 

After the essays, without practical result, of the 
Norsemen to force their way through the north- 
ern ice of Greenland, the Portuguese undertook 



THE SEAMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 65 

to find a sea-way to the Indies round the coast 
of Africa. They were inspired to the venture 
by the lead of Prince Henry "the Navigator" 
half Englishman and half Portuguese. At first 
sight it seems strange that pilots like Columbus, 
who had spent their lives on coasting voyages, 
often going from Venice to Britian, should so 
long have delayed an exploration southward as 
they issued from the Straits of Gibraltar. Still 
more strange does it appear that when at last 
they had set themselves to discover the outline 
of Africa, it took them two generations of almost 
annual voyaging before Da Gama led the way 
into the Indian Ocean. The cause of their diffi- 
culties was physical. For a thousand miles, 
from the latitude of the Canary Islands to that 
of Cape Verde, the African coast is a torrid 
desert, because the dry trade wind there blows 
off the land without ceasing. It might be a 
relatively easy matter to sail southward on that 
steady breeze, but how was the voyage back to 
be accomplished by ships which could not sail 
near the wind like a modern clipper, and yet 
dared neither sail out on to the broad ocean 
across the wind, nor yet tediously tack their 
way home off a coast with no supplies of fresh 
food and water, in a time when the plague of 
scurvy had not yet been mastered? 

Once the Portuguese had found the ocean- 



66 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

way into the Indian seas, they soon disposed of 
the opposition of the Arab dhows. Europe had 
taken its foes in rear; it had sailed round to the 
rear of the land, just as Xerxes, Alexander, 
Hannibal, and the Crusaders had marched 
round to the rear of the sea. 

From that time until the opening of the Suez 
Canal in 1869, the seamen of Europe continued 
in ever-increasing number to round the Cape, 
and to sail northward on the Eastern Ocean 
as far as China and Japan. Only one ship, the 
Vega of the Swedish Baron Nordenskiold, has 
to this day made the passage round the north of 
Asia — with infinite risk, and in two years — and 
she happens not to have circumnavigated the 
Triple Continent, for she returned home through 
the Suez Canal. Nor was the overland journey 
to the Indies undertaken, except as an adven- 
ture, until last century. The trade to the Indies 
was conducted by coasting — no doubt in a bold 
way, from point to point — round the great 
southward promontory whose shores were Euro- 
pean and African on the one side, and African 
and Asiatic on the other. From the point of 
view of the traffic to the Indies, the world was a 
vast cape, standing out southward from between 
Britain and Japan. This world -promontory 
was enveloped by sea-power, as had been the 
Greek and Latin promontories beforehand: all 



THE SEAMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 67 

its coasts were open to ship-borne trade or to 
attack from the sea. The seamen naturally 
chose for the local bases of their trading or war- 
fare small islands off the continental coast, such 
as Mombasa, Bombay, Singapore, and Hong- 
Kong, or small peninsulas, such as the Cape of 
Good Hope and Aden, since those positions 
offered shelter for their ships and security for 
their depots. When grown bolder and stronger 
they put their com- 
mercial cities, such as ** i.fifjgS^ 
Calcutta and Shang- 
hai, near the entry of 
great river ways into 
productive and pop- 
ulous market-lands. 
The seamen of Eu- 
rope, Owing to their Fiq 10 ._ T he^orld-promontory. 

greater mobility, have 

thus had superiority for some four centuries over 

the landsmen of Africa and Asia. 

The passing of the imminent danger to 
Christendom, because of the relative weaken- 
ing of Islam, was, no doubt, one of the reasons 
for the break-up of Mediaeval Europe at the 
close of the Middle Ages; already in 1493 the 
Pope had to draw his famous line through the 
ocean, from Pole to Pole, in order to prevent 
Spanish and Portuguese seamen from quarrel- 




68 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

ing. As a result of this break-up, there arose 
five competing oceanic powers — Portuguese, 
Spanish, French, Dutch, and English — in the 
place of the one power which would, no doubt, 
have been the ideal of the Crusaders. 

Thus the outcome of a thousand years of 
transition, from the ancient to the modern 
conditions of sea-power, is such as to prompt a 
comparison between the Greek and Latin Pen- 
insulas, each with its off-set island. Peninsular 
Greece and insular Crete anticipated in their 
relations the Latin Peninsula and the island of 
Britain. Under the Dorians the greater re- 
sources of the peninsular mainland were utilized 
for the conquest of Crete, but at a later time 
the rivalry of Sparta and Athens prevented a 
full exploitation of the peninsula as a sea-base. 
So in the case of the greater peninsula and 
greater island, Britain was conquered and held 
by Rome from the peninsular mainland; but 
when the Middle Ages were closing, several 
rival sea-bases occupied the Latin Peninsula, 
each of them open to attack from the land be- 
hind, as Athens and Sparta had been open to 
the Macedonian invasion. Of these Latin sea- 
bases, one, Venice, fronted towards Islam, while 
the others contended with internecine feuds for 
the command of the ocean, so that in the end 
the lesser British insular base, faced by no united 



THE SEAMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 69 

peninsular base, became the home of a power 
which enveloped and contained the greater 
peninsula. 

Within Great Britain itself it is true that 
there was not effective unity until the eighteenth 
century, but the facts of physical geography 
have determined that there should always be a 
predominant English people in the south of the 
island, whether as foe or partner of the Scottish 
and Welsh peoples. From Norman days, until 
the growth of the modern industries upon the 
coal-fields, the English nation was almost 
uniquely simple in its structure. It is that 
which makes English history the epic story that 
it is until the histories of Scotland and Ireland 
come to confuse their currents with it. One 
fertile plain between the Mountains of the west 
and north and the Narrow Seas to the east and 
south, a people of farmers, a single king, a 
single parliament, a tidal river, a single great 
city for central market and port — those are the 
elements on which the England was built whose 
warning beacons blazed on the hilltops from 
Plymouth to Berwick-on-Tweed, in that night 
of Elizabeth's reign when the Spanish Armada 
had entered the Channel. On a smaller scale, 
Latium, the Tiber, the City, the Senate, and 
the People of Rome once presented a similar 
unity and a similar executive strength. The 



70 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

real base historically of British sea-power was 
our English plain — fertile and detached; coal 
and iron from round the borders of the plain 




Fig. 11. — The English Plain, a fertile sea-base. 

have been added in later times. The white 
ensign of the Royal Navy is with some historic 
justice the flag of St. George, with a "difference" 
for the minor partners. 

Every characteristic of sea-power may be 



THE SEAMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 71 

studied in British history during the last three 
centuries, but the home-base, productive and 
secure, is the one thing essential to which all 
things else have been added. We are told that 
we should thank God daily for our Channel, but 
as I looked out over the glorious harvest of this 
English plain in this critical year 1918, it seemed 
to me that our thanksgiving as a seafaring 
people should be no less for our fruitful soil. 
Insular Crete had to yield to the Dorians from 
the greater peninsula. 

Four times in the past three centuries was it 
attempted to overthrow British sea-power from 
frontages on the peninsular coast opposite — from 
Spain, from Holland, and twice from France. At 
last, after Trafalgar, British sea-power defini- 
tively enveloped the Latin Peninsula, having 
subsidiary bases at Gibraltar, Malta, and Heligo- 
land. The continental coastline became the ef- 
fective British boundary, notwithstanding the 
enemy privateers, and Britain could prepare war 
at her ease upon the sea. So she undertook the 
"Peninsular" campaigns in Spain, and landed 
armies in the Netherlands in aid of her military 
allies. She even anticipated Gallipoli by bring- 
ing away her armies from Walcheren and 
Corunna. 

When the Napoleonic War was over, British 
sea-power encompassed, almost without compe- 



72 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

tition, that great world-promontory which stands 
forward to the Cape of Good Hope from between 
Britain and Japan. British merchant ships on 
the sea were a part of the British Empire; British 
capital ventured abroad in foreign countries was 
a part of British resources, controlled from the 
city of London and available for the maintenance 
of power on and over the seas. It was a proud 
and lucrative position, and seemed so secure that 
the mid-Victorian folk thought it almost in the 
natural order of things that insular Britain should 
rule the seas. We were, perhaps, not quite a pop- 
ular people in the rest of the world; our position 
behind a Channel seemed an unfair advantage. 
But warships cannot navigate the mountains, and 
since the French wars of the Plantagenets we 
have not sought to make permanent European 
conquests, so that, on the whole, we may hope 
that the verdict of foreign historians on our Brit- 
ain of the nineteenth century may resemble that 
of the famous schoolboy who described his head- 
master as "a beast, but a just beast." 

Perhaps the most remarkable outcome of Brit- 
ish sea-power was the position in the Indian 
Ocean during the generation before the War. The 
British " Raj " in India depended on support from 
the sea, yet on all the waters between the Cape of 
Good Hope, India, and Australia, there was ha- 
bitually no British battle-ship or even first-class 



THE SEAMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 73 

cruiser. In effect, the Indian Ocean was a "closed 
sea." Britain owned or "protected " most of the 
coast lines, and the remaining frontages were 
either on islands, as the Dutch East Indies, or on 
territories such as Portuguese Mozambique and 
German East Africa, which, although continental, 
were inaccessible under existing conditions by 
land-way from Europe. Save in the Persian 
Gulf, there could be no rival base for sea-power 
which combined security with the needful re- 
sources, and Britain made it a declared principle 
of her policy that no sea-base should be estab- 
lished on either the Persian or Turkish shores of 
the Persian Gulf. Superficially there is a striking 
similarity between the closed Mediterranean of 
the Romans, with the legions along the Rhine 
frontier, and the closed Indian Ocean, with the 
British Army on the Northwest Frontier of India. 
The difference lay in the fact that, whereas 
the closing of the Mediterranean depended on 
the Legions, the closing of the Indian Seas was 
maintained by the long arm of sea-power itself 
from the Home base. 



In the foregoing rapid survey of the vicissi- 
tudes of sea-power, we have not stayed to con- 
sider that well-worn theme of the single mastery 
of the seas. Every one now realizes that owing 



74 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

to the continuity of the ocean and the mobility 
of ships, a decisive battle at sea has immediate 
and far-reaching results. Caesar beat Antony at 
Actium, and Caesar's orders were enforceable 
forthwith on every shore of the Mediterranean. 
Britain won her culminating victory at Tra- 
falgar, and could deny all the ocean to the fleets 
of her enemies, could transport her armies to 
whatsoever coast she would and remove them 
again, could carry supplies home from foreign 
sources, and could exert pressure in negotia- 
tion on whatsoever offending State had a sea- 
front. Our concern here has been rather in 
regard to the bases of sea-power and the relation 
to these of land-power. In the long run, that 
is the fundamental question. There were fleets 
of war canoes on the Nile, and the Nile was 
closed to their contention by a single land-power 
controlling their fertile bases through all the 
length of Egypt. A Cretan insular base was 
conquered from a larger Greek peninsular base. 
Macedonian land-power closed the Eastern 
Mediterranean to the warships both of Greeks 
and Phoenicians by depriving them impartially 
of their bases. Hannibal struck overland at the 
peninsular base of Roman sea-power, and that 
base was saved by victory on land. Caesar won 
the mastery of the Mediterranean by victory 
on the water, and Rome then retained control 



THE SEAMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 75 

of it by the defense of land frontiers. In the 
Middle Ages Latin Christendom defended it- 
self on the sea from its peninsular base, but in 
modern times, because competing States grew 
up within that peninsula, and there were sev- 
eral bases of sea-power upon it, all open to 
attack from the land, the mastery of the seas 
passed to a power which was less broadly based, 
but on an island — fortunately a fertile and coal- 
bearing island. On sea-power, thus based, 
British adventurers have founded an overseas 
Empire of colonies, plantations, depots, and 
protectorates, and have established, by means 
of sea-borne armies, local land-powers in India 
and Egypt. So impressive have been the re- 
sults of British sea-power that there has perhaps 
been a tendency to neglect the warnings of 
history and to regard sea-power in general as 
inevitably having, because of the unity of the 
ocean, the last word in the rivalry with land- 
power. 



Never has sea-power played a greater part 
than in the recent War and in the events which 
led up to it. Those events began some twenty 
years ago with three great victories won by the 
British fleet without the firing of a gun. The 
first was at Manila, in the Pacific Ocean, when 



76 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

a German squadron threatened to intervene to 
protect a Spanish squadron, which was being 
defeated by an American squadron, and a 
British squadron stood by the Americans. With- 
out unduly stressing that single incident, it 
may be taken as typical of the relations of the 
Powers during the war between Spain and Amer- 
ica, which war gave to America detached posses- 
sions both in the Atlantic and Pacific, and led 
to her undertaking the construction of the 
Panama Canal, in order to gain the advantages 
of insularity for the mobilization of her war- 
ships. So was a first step taken towards the 
reconciliation of British and American hearts. 
Moreover the Monroe doctrine was upheld in 
regard to South America. 

The second of these victories of the British 
fleet was when it held the ocean during the 
South African War, of such vital consequence 
to the maintenance of the British rule in India; 
and the third was when it kept the ring round 
the Russo-Japanese War, and incidentally kept 
the door open into China. In all three cases 
history would have been very different but for 
the intervention of the British fleet. None the 
less — and perhaps as a consequence — the growth 
of the German fleet under the successive Navy 
Laws, induced the withdrawal of the British 
battle squadrons from the Far East and from 



THE SEAMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 77 

the Mediterranean, and cooperation in those 
seas with the Japanese and French sea-powers. 

The Great War itself began in the old style, 
and it was not until 1917 that the new. aspects 
of Reality became evident. In the very first 
days of the struggle the British fleet had already 
taken command of the ocean, enveloping, with 
the assistance of the French fleet, the whole 
peninsular theater of the war on land. The 
German troops in the German Colonies were 
isolated, German merchant shipping was driven 
off the seas, the British expeditionary force was 
transported across the Channel without the 
loss of a man or a horse, and British and French 
supplies from over the ocean were safely brought 
in. In a word, the territories of Britain and 
France were made one for the purpose of the 
war, and their joint boundary was advanced to 
within gunshot range of the German coast — no 
small offset for the temporary, though deeply 
regretted, loss of certain French departments. 
After the battle of the Marne the true war-map 
of Europe would have shown a Franco-British 
frontier following the Norwegian, Danish, Ger- 
man, Dutch, and Belgian coasts — at a distance 
of three miles in the case of the neutral coasts — 
and then running as a sinuous line through Bel- 
gium and France to the Jura border of Switzer- 
land. West of that boundary, whether by land 



78 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

or sea, the two Powers could make ready their 
defense against the enemy. Nine months later 
Italy dared to join the Allies, mainly because her 
ports were kept open by the Allied sea-power. 

On the Eastern front also the old style of 
war held. Land-power was there divided into 
two contending forces, and the outer of the two, 
notwithstanding its incongruous Czardom, was 
allied with the sea-power of the Democratic 
West. In short, the disposition of forces re- 
peated in a general way that of a century earlier, 
when British sea-power supported the Portu- 
guese and Spaniards in "the Peninsula," and was 
allied with the autocracies of the Eastern land- 
powers. Napoleon fought on two fronts, which 
in the terms of to-day we should describe as 
Western and Eastern. 

In 1917, however, came a great change, due 
to the entry of the United States into the War, 
the fall of the Russian Czardom, and the sub- 
sequent collapse of the Russian fighting strength. 
The world-strategy of the contest was entirely 
altered. We have been fighting since, and can 
afford to say it without hurting any of our allies, 
to make the world a safe place for democracies. 
So much as regards Idealism. But it is equally 
important that we should bear in mind the new 
face of Reality. We have been fighting lately, 
in the close of the War, a straight duel between 



THE SEAMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 79 

land-power and sea-power, and sea-power has 
been laying siege to land-power. We have con- 
quered, but had Germany conquered she would 
have established her sea-power on a wider base 
than any in history, and in fact on the widest pos- 
sible base. The joint continent of Europe, Asia, 
and Africa, is now effectively, and not merely the- 
oretically, an island, j Now and again, lest we for- 
get, let us call it the World-Island in what follows. 

One reason why the seamen did not long ago 
rise to the generalization implied in the expres- 
sion "World-Island," is that they could not make 
the round voyage of it. An ice-cap, two thousand 
miles across, floats on the Polar Sea, with one 
edge aground on the shoals off the north of Asia. 
For the common purposes of navigation, there- 
fore, the continent is not an island. The seamen 
of the last four centuries have treated it as a 
vast promontory stretching southward from a 
vague north, as a mountain peak may rise out 
of the clouds from hidden foundations. Even in 
the last century, since the opening of the Suez 
Canal, the eastward voyage has still been round a 
promontory, though with the point at Singapore 
instead of Cape Town. 

This fact and its vastness have made men 
think of the Continent as though it differed 
from other islands in more than size. We speak 
of its parts as Europe, Asia, and Africa in pre- 



80 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

cisely the same way that we speak of the parts 
of the ocean as Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian. 
In theory even the ancient Greeks regarded it 
as insular, yet they spoke of it as the "World." 
The school-children of to-day are taught of it 
as the "Old World," in contrast with a certain 
pair of peninsulas which together constitute the 
"New World." Seamen speak of it merely as 
"the Continent," the continuous land. 

Let us consider for a moment the proportions 
and relations of this newly realized Great 
Island. 1 It is set as it were on the shoulder of 
the earth with reference to the North Pole. 
Measuring from Pole to Pole along the central 
meridian of Asia, we have first a thousand miles 
of ice-clad sea as far as the northern shore of 
Siberia, then five thousand miles of land to the 
southern point of India, and then seven thousand 
miles of sea to the Antarctic cap of ice-clad 
land. But measured along the meridian of the 
Bay of Bengal or of the Arabian Sea, Asia is 
only some three thousand five hundred miles 
across. From Paris to Vladivostok is six thou- 
sand miles, and from Paris to the Cape of Good 
Hope is a similar distance; but these measure- 
ments are on a globe twenty-six thousand 

1 It would be misleading to attempt to represent the statements which 
follow in map form. They can only be appreciated on a globe. There- 
fore they are illustrated by diagrams; see Figs. 12 and 13. 



THE SEAMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 81 

miles round. Were it not for the ice impedi- 
ment to its circumnavigation, practical seamen 
would long ago have spoken of the Great Island 
by some such name, for it is only a little more 
than one-fifth as large as their ocean. 

The World-Island ends in points north- 
eastward and southeastward. On a clear day 
you can see from the northeastern headland 
across Bering Strait to the beginning of the 
long pair of peninsulas, each measuring about 
one twenty-sixth of the globe, which we call the 
Americas. Superficially there is no doubt a 
certain resemblance of symmetry in the Old and 
New Worlds; each consists of two peninsulas, 
Africa and Euro-Asia in the one case, and North 
and South America in the other. But there is 
no real likeness between them. The northern 
and northeastern shores of Africa for nearly 
four thousand miles are so intimately related 
with the opposite shores of Europe and Asia that 
the Sahara constitutes a far more effective break 
in social continuity than does the Mediterranean. 
In the days of air navigation which are coming, 
sea-power will use the water way of the Mediter- 
ranean and Red Seas only by the sufferance of 
land-power, for air-power is chiefly an arm of 
land-power, a new amphibious cavalry, when 
the contest with sea-power is in question. 

But North and South America, slenderly 



82 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

connected at Panama, are for practical purposes 
insular rather than peninsular in regard to one 
another. South America lies not merely to 
south, but also in the main to east of North 
America ; the two lands are in echelon, as soldiers 
would say, and thus the broad ocean encircles 
South America, except for a minute proportion 
of its outline. A like fact is true of North Amer- 
ica with reference to Asia, for it stretches out 
into the ocean from Bering Strait so that, as 
may be seen upon a globe, the shortest way 
from Pekin to New York is across Bering Strait, 
a circumstance which may some day have im- 
portance for the traveler by railway or air. 
The third of the new continents, Australia, lies 
a thousand miles from the southeastern point 
of Asia, and measures only one sixty -fifth of the 
surface of the globe. 

Thus the three so-called new continents are in 
point of area merely satellites of the old conti- 
nent. There is one ocean covering nine-twelfths 
of the globe; there is one continent — the World- 
Island — covering two-twelfths of the globe; and 
there are many smaller islands, whereof North 
America and South America are for effective 
purposes two, which together cover the remain- 
ing one-twelfth. The term "New World " implies, 
now that we can see the Realities and not merely 
historic appearances, a wrong perspective. 



THE SEAMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 83 

The truth, seen with a broad vision, is that 
in the great World-Promontory, extending south- 
ward to the Cape of Good Hope, and in the North 
American sea-base we have, on a vast scale, yet a 
third contrast of peninsula and island to be set 
beside the Greek peninsula and the island of 
Crete, and the Latin Peninsula and the British 
Island. But there is this vital difference, that 
the World-Promontory, when united by modern 
overland communications, is in fact the World- 
Island, possessed potentially of the advantages 
both of insularity and of incomparably great 
resources. 

Leading Americans have for some time ap- 
preciated the fact that their country is no 
longer a world apart, and President Wilson 
had brought his whole people round to that 
view when they consented to throw themselves 
into the War. But North America is no longer 
even a continent; in this twentieth century it 
is shrinking to be an island. Americans used 
to think of their three millions of square miles 
as the equivalent of all Europe; some day, 
they said, there would be a United States of 
Europe as sister to the United States of Amer- 
ica. Now, though they may not all have real- 
ized it, they must no longer think of Europe 
apart from Asia and Africa. The Old World 
has become insular, or in other words a unit, 



THE SEAMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 85 

incomparably the largest geographical unit on 
our globe. 

There is a remarkable parallelism between 
the short history of America and the longer 
history of England; both countries have now 
passed through the same succession of Colonial, 
Continental, and Insular stages. The Angle 
and Saxon settlements along the east and south 
coast of Britain have often been regarded as 
anticipating the thirteen English Colonies along 
the east coast of North America; what has not 
always been remembered is that there was a 
continental stage in English history to be com- 
pared with that of Lincoln in America. The 
wars of Alfred the Great and William the Con- 
queror were in no small degree between contend- 
ing parts of England, with the Norsemen inter- 
vening, and England was not effectively insular 
until the time of Elizabeth, because not until 
then was she free from the hostility of Scotland, 
and herself united, and therefore a unit, in her 
relations with the neighboring continent. Amer- 
ica is to-day a unit, for the American people 
have fought out their internal differences, and 
it is insular, because events are compelling Amer- 
icans to realize that their so-called continent 
lies on the same globe as the Continent. 

Picture upon the map of the world this War 
as it has been fought in the year 1918. It has 



86 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

been a war between Islanders and Continentals, 
there can be no doubt of that. It has been 
fought on the Continent, chiefly across the 
landward front of peninsular France; and ranged 
on the one side have been Britain, Canada, the 
United States, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, 
and Japan — all insular. France and Italy are 
peninsular, but even with that advantage they 
would not have been in the War to the end had 
it not been for the support of the Islanders. 
India and China — so far as China has been in 
the War on the Manchurian front — may be 
regarded as advanced guards of British, Ameri- 
can, and Japanese sea-power. Dutch Java is 
the only island of large population which is not 
in the Western Alliance, and even Java is not 
on the side of the Continentals. There can be 
no mistaking the significance of this unanimity 
of the Islanders. The collapse of Russia has 
cleared our view of the realities, as the Russian 
revolution purified the ideals for which we have 
been fighting. 

The facts appear in the same perspective if 
we consider the population of the globe. More 
than fourteen-sixteenths of all humanity live 
on the Great Continent, and nearly one-sixteenth 
more on the closely off-set Islands of Britain 
and Japan. Even to-day, after four centuries 
of emigration, only about one-sixteenth live in 



THE SEAMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 87 

the lesser continents. Nor is time likely to 
change these proportions materially. If the 
middle-west of North America comes presently 
to support, let us say, another hundred million 
people, it is probable that the interior of Asia will 
at the same time carry two hundred millions 
more than now, and if the Tropical part of South 
America should feed a hundred millions more, 
then the Tropical parts of Africa and the Indies 
may not improbably support two hundred 
millions more. The Congo Forest alone, sub- 
dued to agriculture, would maintain some four 
hundred million souls if populated with the same 
density as Java, and the Javanese population 
is still growing. Have we any right, moreover, 
to assume that, given its climate and history, 
the interior of Asia would not nourish a popula- 
tion as virile as that of Europe, North America, 
or Japan? 

What if the Great Continent, the whole 
World-Island or a large part of it, were at some 
future time to become a single and united base 
of sea-power? Would not the other insular 
bases be outbuilt as regards ships and outmanned 
as regards seamen? Their fleets would no doubt 
fight with all the heroism begotten of their 
histories, but the end would be fated. Even in 
the present War, insular America has had to 
come to the aid of insular Britain, not because 



■:o 



t o 




THE SEAMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 89 

the British fleet could not have held the seas 
for the time being, but lest such a building and 
manning base were to be assured to Germany 
at the Peace, or rather Truce, that Britain 
would inevitably be outbuilt and outmanned a 
few years later. 

The surrender of the German fleet in the 
Firth of Forth is a dazzling event, but in all 
soberness, if we would take the long view, must 
we not still reckon with the possibility that a 
large part of the Great Continent might some 
day be united under a single sway, and that an 
invincible sea-power might be based upon it? 
May we not have headed off that danger in this 
War, and yet leave by our settlement the open- 
ing for a fresh attempt in the future? Ought we 
not to recognize that that is the great ultimate 
threat to the World's liberty so far as strategy 
is concerned, and to provide against it in our 
new political system? 

Let us look at the matter from the Lands- 
man's point of view. 



IV 

THE LANDSMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 

Four centuries ago the whole outlook of man- 
kind was changed in a single generation by the 
voyages of the great pioneers, Columbus, Da 
Gama, and Magellan. The idea of the unity of 
the ocean, beforehand merely inferred from the 
likeness of the tides in the Atlantic and Indian 
waters, suddenly became a part of the mental 
equipment of practical men. A similar revolu- 
tion is in progress in the present generation in 
the rapid realization of the unity of the Conti- 
nent owing to modern methods of communi- 
cation by land and air. The Islanders have been 
slow to understand what is happening. Britain 
went into the War for the defense of her neigh- 
bors, Belgium and France, seeing vaguely per- 
haps that she was herself threatened through 
their danger, but almost unanimous in her de- 
cision only because of a moral tie, her bond in 
regard to Belgium. America was shocked by 
the Lusitania tragedy, and was ultimately 
brought in because of the general infringement 
of the rights of neutrals by the German sub- 
marines. Neither of the Anglo-Saxon nations 

90 



THE LANDSMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 91 

at first clearly saw the strategical meaning of 
the War. Theirs was an external view of the 
Continent, like that of the seamen who named 
the Guinea, Malabar, Coromandel, and Murman 
"Coasts." Neither in London nor in New York 
were International Politics commonly discussed 




Fig. 14. — Showing the great part of Asia and Europe whose rivers flow 
either to the icy north, or into salt lakes without exit to the ocean; 
also how Africa faces Europe and Asia for 4000 miles. (Equal areas 
projection.) 

in the way in which they are discussed in the 
cafes of Continental Europe. In order, there- 
fore, to appreciate the Continental view we 
must remove our standpoint from without to 
within the great ring of the "Coasts." 

Let us begin by "brigading" our data, for only 
so shall we be able to reason conveniently about 
the realities which the Continent presents for 
strategical thought. When you are thinking of 



m DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

large things you must think on broad lines; the 
colonel of a battalion thinks in companies, but 
the general of a division in brigades. For the 
purpose of forming our brigades, however, it 
will be necessary at the outset to go into some 
degree of geographical detail. 



The northern edge of Asia is the Inaccessible 
Coast, beset with ice except for a narrow water 
lane which opens here and there along the shore 
in the brief summer owing to the melting of the 
local ice formed in the winter between the 
grounded floes and the land. It so happens that 
three of the largest rivers in the world, the Lena, 
Yenisei, and Obi, stream northward through 
Siberia to this coast, and are therefore detached 
for practical purposes from the general system 
of the ocean and river navigations. 1 South of 
Siberia are other regions at least as large, drained 
into salt lakes having no outlet to the ocean; 
such are the basins of the Volga and Ural Rivers 
flowing to the Caspian Sea, and of the Oxus and 
Jaxartes to the Sea of Aral. Geographers usu- 
ally describe these inward basins as "Conti- 

1 This is true up to the present time, though, with the aid of modern 
ice-breakers, the efforts which are being made, especially by Tyneside 
enterprise, to open a direct route to the mouths of the Obi and Yenisei 
may perhaps result in the establishment of a sea-borne summer traffic 
to Western Siberia. 



THE LANDSMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 93 

nental." Taken together, the regions of Arctic 
and Continental drainage measure nearly a half 
of Asia and a quarter of Europe, and form a 
great continuous patch in the north and center 
of the continent. That whole patch, extending 
right across from the icy, flat shore of Siberia to 
the torrid, steep coasts of Baluchistan and Per- 
sia, has been inaccessible to navigation from the 
ocean. The opening of it by railways — for it 
was practically roadless beforehand — and by 
aeroplane routes in the near future, consti- 
tutes a revolution in the relations of men to the 
larger geographical realities of the world. Let 
us call this great region the Heartland of the 
Continent. 

The north, center, and west of the Heart- 
land are a plain, rising only a few hundred feet 
at most above sea level. In that greatest low- 
land on the globe are included Western Siberia, 
Turkestan, and the Volga basin of Europe, for 
the Ural Mountains, though a long range, are 
not of important height, and terminate some 
three hundred miles north of the Caspian, 
leaving a broad gateway from Siberia into Eu- 
rope. Let us speak of this vast plain as the 
Great Lowland. 

Southward the Great Lowland ends along the 
foot of a tableland, whose average elevation is 
about half a mile, with mountain ridges rising 



THE LANDSMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 95 

to a mile and a half. This tableland bears upon 
its broad back the three countries of Persia, 
Afghanistan, and Baluchistan; for convenience 
we may describe the whole of it as the Iranian 
Upland. The Heartland, in the sense of the 
region of Arctic and Continental drainage, in- 
cludes most of the Great Lowland and most of 
the Iranian Upland; it extends therefore to the 
long, high, curving brink of the Persian Moun- 
tains, beyond which is the depression occupied 
by the Euphrates Valley and the Persian Gulf. 
Now let us travel in imagination to the west 
of Africa. There, between the latitudes of the 
Canary and Cape Verde Islands, is a Desert 
Coast: it was the character of that coast, it 
will be remembered, which so long baffled the 
effort of the mediaeval sailors to make the south- 
ward voyage round Africa. With a breadth of a 
thousand miles the Sahara spreads thence 
across the north of Africa from the Atlantic 
Ocean to the Valley of the Nile. The Sahara is 
not everywhere an utter desert; there are many 
oases — trenched valleys with wells to the water 
percolating underground in their bottoms, or 
hilly tracts against which at times the clouds 
gather — but these are minute and scattered 
exceptions upon a barren and riverless area 
nearly as large as all Europe. The Sahara is 
the most unbroken natural boundary in the 



96 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

world; throughout History it has been a barrier 
between the White and the Black men. 

Between the Sahara and the Heartland there 
is a broad gap which is occupied by Arabia. 
The two brinks of the Nile Valley are known as 
Libyan to the West and Arabian to the East; 
and away beyond the Lower Euphrates, at the 
foot of the Persian Mountains, is the district 
known as Arabistan or the country of the Arabs. 
In complete harmony, therefore, with local 
usage, Arabia may be regarded as spreading for 
800 miles from the Nile to beyond the Euphrates. 
From the foot of the Taurus Mountains, north 
of Aleppo, to the Gulf of Aden, it measures no 
less than 1800 miles. As to one-half, Arabia is 
desert, and as to the other half mainly dry 
steppes; although it lies in the same latitudes 
as the Sahara, it is more productive and carries 
a more considerable population of wandering 
Bedouin. Moreover, it has larger oases, and 
therefore larger cities. What, however, most 
distinguishes Arabia both from the Heartland 
and the Sahara is the fact that it is traversed 
by three great water ways in connection with 
the ocean — the Nile, the Red Sea, and the 
Euphrates and Persian Gulf. None of these 
three ways, however, affords naturally a com- 
plete passage across the arid belt. The Nile 
was navigable from the Mediterranean only to 



THE LANDSMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 97 

the first cataract, midway across the desert, 
though locks have now been constructed at 
Assouan which give access as far as the second 
cataract; and the navigation of the Euphrates 
ascends only to a point a hundred miles from the 
Mediterranean. To-day it is true that the Suez 
Canal unites the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, 
but it was not only the isthmus which formerly 
impeded through traffic by this route; persist- 
ent north winds of the trade wind current blow 
down the northern end of the Red Sea, which is 
beset with rocks, and sailing ships do not will- 
ingly attempt the northward voyage to the 
Canal, which would therefore have been rela- 
tively useless but for steam navigation. The 
former Red Sea route to the Mediterranean was 
from Kosseir on the west coast over the desert 
to the Nile at Keneh, and then down the Nile; 
that was the way followed by the British Army 
when sent from India to Egypt more than a 
hundred years ago, at the time of the Napo- 
leonic invasion of Egypt and Palestine. 

It follows from the foregoing description that 
the Heartland, Arabia, and the Sahara together 
constitute a broad, curving belt inaccessible to 
seafaring people, except by the three Arabian 
water ways. This belt extends completely across 
the great continent from the Arctic to the At- 
lantic shores. In Arabia it touches the Indian 




Fig. 16 —The World-Island, divided into 




natural regions. (Equal areas projection.) 



100 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

Ocean, and, as a consequence, divides the re- 
mainder of the Continent into three separate 
regions whose rivers flow to the ice-free ocean. 
These regions are the Pacific and Indian slopes 
of Asia; the peninsulas and islands of Europe 
and the Mediterranean; and the great promon- 
tory of Africa south of the Sahara. The last- 
named differs from the other two regions in a 
very important respect. Its larger rivers, the 
Niger, Zambesi, and Congo, and also its smaller 
rivers, such as the Orange and Limpopo, flow 
across the tableland of the interior, and fall 
steeply over its edge to relatively short seaward 
reaches in the narrow coastal lowlands. The 
long upland courses of these rivers are navigable 
for several thousand miles, but are for practical 
purposes as completely detached from the ocean 
as the rivers of Siberia. The same, of course, 
is true of the Nile above the cataracts. We may, 
therefore, regard the interior of Africa south of 
the Sahara as a second Heartland. Let us 
speak of it as the Southern Heartland, in contra- 
distinction to the Northern Heartland of Asia 
and Europe. 

Notwithstanding their very different latitudes 
the two Heartlands present other striking simi- 
larities. A great belt of forest, mainly of the 
evergreen type of the pines and firs, spreads from 
North Germany and the Baltic shore right 



THE LANDSMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 101 

across to Manchuria, connecting by a forest- 
ribbon, as it were, the forests of Europe with 
those of the Pacific Coast. South of this forest 
zone the Heartland lies open, with trees only 
along the river banks and upon the mountains. 
This vast, open ground is a luscious prairie 
along the southern border of the forest, and 
brilliant with bulb-flowers in the spring-time, 
but southward, as the aridity increases, the 
grass becomes coarser and more sparse. The 
whole grassland, rich and poor, is conveniently 
spoken of as the Steppes, although that name 
properly belongs only to the less fertile southern 
tracts which surround the desert patches of 
Turkestan and Mongolia. The Steppes were 
probably the original habitat of the horse, and 
in their southern parts, of the two-humped 
camel (Fig. 18). 

The Southern Heartland also has its wide 
open grasslands, which in the Sudan gradually 
increase in fertility from the edge of the Sahara 
towards the tropical forest of the Guinea Coast 
and the Congo. The forests do not spread com- 
pletely across to the Indian Ocean, but leave 
a belt of grassy upland which connects the grass- 
lands of the Sudan with those of South Africa, 
and this immense, open ground, thus contin- 
uous from the Sudan to the Cape Veldt, is the 
home of the antelopes, zebras, and other large, 



102 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

hoofed game, which correspond to the wild 
horses and wild asses of the Northern Heartland. 



5=^ci^ 




Fig. 17.— The Southern Heartland. = River falls. 
<— Lines of Arab invasion. 

Though the zebra has not been successfully do- 
mesticated, and the South African natives had 
no usual beast of burden, yet the horse and the 



THE LANDSMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 103 

one-humped camel of Arabia were early intro- 
duced into the Sudan. In both Heartlands, 
therefore, although to a greater extent in the 
Northern than in the Southern, mobility by the 
aid of animals has been available to replace the 
riverwise and coastwise mobility of the ships of 
the Atlantic and Pacific coastlands. 

The Northern Heartland adjoins Arabia, as 
we have seen, for many hundred miles where 
the Iranian Upland drops to the Euphrates 
Valley; the Southern Heartland, at its north- 
eastern corner in Abyssinia and Somaliland, 
grasps, though with an interval of sea, the 
southern fertile angle of Arabia, known as Yemen. 
So the Steppes of Arabia, enframing its deserts, 
serve as a passage-land between the Northern 
and Southern Heartlands; and there is also the 
way by the banks of the Nile through Nubia. 
Thus it will be realized that the Northern 
Heartland, Arabia, and the Southern Heartland 
afford a broad, grassy way for horsemen and 
camel-men from Siberia through Persia, Arabia, 
and Egypt into the Sudan, and that but for the 
tsetse-fly and other plagues men would prob- 
ably have penetrated on horseback and camel- 
back southward almost to the Cape of Good 
Hope. 

Outside Arabia, the Sahara, and the two 
Heartlands, there remain in the World-Island 



104 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS. AND REALITY 

only two comparatively small regions, but those 
two regions are the most important on the globe. 
Around the Mediterranean, and in the European 




Fig. 18.— The Steppes. 

peninsulas and islands, there dwell four hundred 
million people, and in the southern and eastern 
coastlands of Asia, or, to use the historic expres- 
sion, in the Indies, there dwell eight hundred 



THE LANDSMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 105 

million people. In these two regions, therefore, 
are three-quarters of the people of the world. 
From our present point of view the most per- 




-»;w:.s : ? 

HAW Mrs.:'V;-.v^v>:*;S 



////// Grasslands. 



tinent way of stating this great fact is to say- 
that four-fifths of the population of the Great 
Continent, the World-Island, live in two regions 

which together measure only one-fifth of its area. 

— — - J 



106 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

These two regions resemble one another in 
certain other very important respects. In the 
first place, their rivers are for the most part 
navigable continuously from the ocean. In the 
Indies we have this series of large rivers descend- 
ing to the open sea; Indus, Ganges, Brahma- 
putra, Irrawady, Salwen, Menam, Mekong, 
Songho, Sikiang, Yangtse, Hoangho, Peiho, 
Liauho, Amur. Most of them are navigable 
from their mouths for some hundreds of miles; 
a British battleship once steamed up the Yangtse 
to Hankow, five hundred miles from the sea. 
There is not much space for such large rivers in 
peninsular Europe, but the Danube, Rhine, and 
Elbe carry a great traffic in direct connection 
with the ocean. Mannheim, three hundred 
miles up the Rhine, was one of the principal 
ports of Europe before the War; barges a hun- 
dred yards long and of a thousand tons burden 
lay beside its wharves. For the rest, the pen- 
insulation of Europe, which limits the develop- 
ment of rivers, itself offers even greater facilities 
for mobility by water. 

The similarity of these two "Coastlands" is 
not limited to the navigability of their rivers. 
If we clear away from the more arid zone on the 
rainfall map of the World-Island the patches 
indicative of merely local rains, due to mountain 
groups, we perceive at once the preeminence of 



THE LANDSMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 107 

the coastlands in fertility, owing to their wide- 
spread rainfall on the plains as well as in the 
mountains. The Monsoon winds of the summer 
carry the moisture of the ocean from the south- 
west on to India and from the southeast on to 
China; the west winds from the Atlantic bring 
rain at all seasons upon Europe, and in the win- 
ter time upon the Mediterranean. Both coast- 
lands are therefore rich with tillage, and for 
that reason nourish their great populations. 
Thus Europe and the Indies are the regions of 
the ploughmen and shipmen; whereas the North- 
ern Heartland, Arabia, and the Southern Heart- 
land have for the most part been unplowed, 
and are inaccessible to sea-going ships. On the 
other hand, they are naturally adapted to the 
mobility of horsemen and camel-men, with 
their herds of cattle and flocks of sheep. Even 
on the savannahs of Tropical Africa, where 
horses and camels are absent, the wealth of the 
natives is chiefly of cattle and sheep. These 
are of course broad generalizations, with many 
local exceptions; they are none the less truly 
and sufficiently descriptive of immense geo- 
graphical realities. 1 

1 Realities, that is to say, that have conditioned History, and have 
thus led to the present distribution of population and civilization. These 
same realities have to-day begun to take on new aspects, owing to the 
higher organization of food production on the richer grasslands. 



108 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

Let us now call History to our aid, for no 
practical idea, no idea which moves men to 
action, can be grasped statically; we must come 
to it with a momentum of thought either from 
our own experience or from the history of the 
race. The oases of the East count in poetry as 



™>'nim» 




Fig. 19. — Northern Arabia. 

the Gardens of the World, only because they 
are approached over the desert! 

Recorded History begins in the great oases 
round the north of Arabia. The first Inter- 
national Politics of which we have definite 
knowledge were concerned with the intercourse 
between two States which had grown up on the 
alluvial flats of the Lower Euphrates and Lower 



THE LANDSMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 109 

Nile; the maintenance of dykes to keep out the 
water, and of canals to distribute water, inevit- 
ably gives an impulse to social order and disci- 
pline. There was a certain difference in the two 
civilizations which may well have been the 
basis of interchange between them. In Egypt 




Fig. 20. — The mobile conquerors of the plowed lands. 

the rocky sides of the relatively narrow valley 
offered stone for building, and the papyrus reed 
afforded a material for writing; whereas build- 
ing was of brick in the broad plain of Babylonia, 
and clay tablets bore the cuneiform inscriptions. 
The road between the two countries ran west- 
ward from the Euphrates across the Syrian 
angle of the Arabian Desert, past the wells of 



110 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

Palmyra, to Damascus, which was built in the 
oasis formed by the streams Abana and Pharpar 
descending from Anti-Lebanon and Hermon. 
From Damascus there were alternative ways 
into Egypt; the lower by the coast, and the 
upper along the edge of the desert plateau east 
of the Jordan Valley. Aloof, on the rocky ridge 
of Judea, between these upper and lower ways, 
was the hill fortress of Jerusalem. 

In a monkish map, contemporary with the 
Crusades, which still hangs in Hereford Cathe- 
dral, Jerusalem is marked as at the geometrical 
center, the navel, of the world, and on the floor 
of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher at Jerusa- 
lem they will show you to this day the precise 
spot which is the center. If our study of the 
geographical realities, as we now know them in 
their completeness, is leading us to right con- 
clusions, the mediaeval ecclesiastics were not 
far wrong. If the World-Island be inevitably 
the principal seat of humanity on this globe, 
and if Arabia, as the passage-land from Europe 
to the Indies and from the Northern to the 
Southern Heartland, be central in the World- 
Island, then the hill citadel of Jerusalem has a 
strategical position with reference to world- 
realities not differing essentially from its ideal 
position in the perspective of the Middle Ages, 
or its strategical position between ancient Baby- 



THE LANDSMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 111 



Ion and Egypt. As the War has shown, the 
Suez Canal carries the rich traffic between the 
Indies and Europe to within striking distance 
of an army based on Palestine, and already the 
trunk railway is being built through the coastal 
plain by Jaffa, which will connect the Southern 
with the Northern Heartland. Who owns Da- 
mascus, moreover, will have flank access to the 
alternative route between the oceans down the 
Euphrates Valley. It can- 
not be wholly a coinci- 
dence that in the self -same 
region should be the start- 
ing point of History and 
the crossing point of the 
most vital of modern high- 
ways. 

In the dawn of His- 
tory we find the children 

of Shem, the Semites, conquering the cultivated 
margins of the Arabian deserts; there is no 
small similarity between the ring of their settle- 
ments round the sea of sand, and the settle- 
ments of the Greeks round the iEgean Sea. The 
invasion of the Promised Land from beyond 
the Jordan by the Beni-Israel, the Children of 
Israel, was probably but one of many like 
descents of the Bedouin. The Chaldees, from 
whose city of Ur on the desert border Abraham 




Fig. 21. — A mediaeval 
Wheel-map. 



112 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

migrated along the beaten track into Palestine, 
were Semites who supplanted the non-Semitic 
Accadian,s in the land which became Babylonia; 
and the Dynasty of the Shepherd Kings in 
Egypt was also apparently of Semitic origin. 
So it came about that all the peoples of Arabia — 
Arabs, Babylonians, Assyrians, Syrians, Phoeni- 
cians, and Hebrews — spoke dialects of the same 
Semitic family of speech. To-day Arabic is 
the universal tongue from the Taurus to the 
Gulf of Aden, and from the Persian Mountains 
to the oases in the Sahara west of the Nile. 

The Arabian tableland drops steeply to the 
sea shores around in all directions save one; 
northeastward it shelves gradually down to the 
depression occupied by the Euphrates and the 
Persian Gulf. That depression is 1800 miles 
long, from the gorge by which the Euphrates 
issues from its source valley in the Armenian 
Plateau to the Strait of Ormuz at the mouth of 
the Persian Gulf; throughout its length it is 
overlooked by the range of the Persian Moun- 
tains, the high Iranian brink of the Heartland. 
One of the great events of Classical History was 
when the Persian Highlanders came down on 
to the Euphrates plain under their King Cyrus, 
and, after conquering Babylon, passed on by 
the Syrian road through Damascus to the con- 
quest of Egypt. 



THE LANDSMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 113 

The gorge by which the Euphrates escapes 
from the Armenian upland is more than 800 
miles in a direct line from the river mouth and 
only a little more than 100 miles from the north- 
eastern corner of the Mediterranean Sea near 
Aleppo. Immediately west of this gorge the 
High Upland of Armenia, some one and a half 
miles in average elevation, drops to the much 
lower peninsular tableland of Asia Minor. A 
second great event in Classical History was when 
the Macedonians, under King Alexander, having 
crossed the Dardanelles and traversed the open 
center of Asia Minor, descended by the Taurus 
passes into Cilicia, and struck through Syria 
into Egypt, and then from Egypt back through 
Syria to the Euphrates, and down the Euphrates 
to Babylon. It is true that Alexander thus led 
his Macedonians overland into Arabia, but their 
attack was really based on sea-power, as is 
evident from the rapid rise which ensued of the 
great Greek-speaking ports of Alexandria and 
Antioch, the coastal capitals, that is to say, of 
seamen going inland. 

If these facts be considered with a geographi- 
cal eye, a belt of fertility will be seen extending 
northwestward up the Euphrates, then curv- 
ing to southward along the rain-gathering moun- 
tains of Syria, and ending westward in Egypt. 
It is a populous belt, for it is inhabited by the 



114 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

settled plowmen. Except for two intervals 
of sterility, the trunk road of antiquity ran 
through its cornfields from Babylon to Mem- 
phis. The key to some of the greater events of 
Ancient History is to be found in the subjection 
of the peoples of this agricultural strip now to 
this and now to that neighboring race of supe- 
rior mobility. From the south, with all the 
depth of Arabia behind them, the camel-men 
advanced northeastward against Mesopotamia, 
northwestward against Syria, and westward 
against Egypt; from the northeast, with all 
the vast depth of the Heartland behind them, 
the Horsemen came down from the Iranian 
upland into Mesopotamia; and from the north- 
west, whether across the peninsula of Asia 
Minor or directly to the Levantine shore, came 
the shipmen against Syria and Egypt, having 
behind them all the water ways of Europe. 1 

In Asia the Romans did but take over the 
western portion of the Macedonian conquests. 
As the Rhine and Danube, defended by the 
Legions, marked the extent of Roman penetra- 
tion northward from the Mediterranean, so the 
Upper Euphrates, where it flows from north to 
south before bending southeastward, marked 
the limit, defended by other Legions, of their 
eastward penetration from the Mediterranean. 

1 See Fig. 20 on p. 109. 



THE LANDSMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 115 

The Roman Empire was, in fact, in the large 
sense, a local Empire; it belonged wholly to the 
Atlantic Coastland. The further provinces 
which had been under the Macedonian sway 
fell in Roman times to the Parthians, successors 
of the Persians, who in their turn descended 
from Iran upon Mesopotamia. 

Once more came the opportunity of the camel- 
men. Inspired by the preaching of Mohammed, 
the Arabs of the central oasis of Nejd, and of its 
western extension in the Hedjaz of Mecca and 
Medina, sent forth the Saracen armies, who 
drove the Parthians from Mesopotamia, and 
the Romans from Syria and Egypt, and estab- 
lished a chain of inland Capitals — Cairo, Da- 
mascus, and Bagdad — in the ancient trackway 
of fertility. From this fertile base the Saracen 
power was carried into all the regions around in 
such manner as to make a bid for a truly World- 
Empire. Northeastward the Mohammedans as- 
cended from Bagdad into Iran by the same 
passway which had guided the Parthians and 
Persians downward, and they spread even into 
Northern India. Southward they crossed from 
the Yemen headland of Arabia to the African 
coast south of the Sahara, and penetrated on 
their camels and horses through the whole 
breadth of the Sudan. Thus, like a vast eagle, 
their Empire of Land-power spread its wings 



116 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

from the Arabian Centerland, on the one hand 
over the Northern Heartland, far into the depths 
of Asia, and on the other hand over the Southern 
Heartland equally far into the depths of Africa. 

But the Saracens were not content with a 
dominion based only on the means of mobility 
proper to their steppes and deserts; like their 
predecessors, the Phoenicians and Shebans, they 
took to the sea. Westward they traveled along 
the north coast of Africa, both on sea and land, 
until they came to two countries, Barbary and 
Spain, whose broad tablelands, neither utterly 
sterile like the Sahara, nor yet forested like 
most of the European Peninsula, repeated in 
some degree the conditions of their own home- 
land. On the other hand, eastward from Ye- 
men, at the mouth of the Red Sea, and from 
Oman, at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, they 
sailed on the summer Monsoon to the Malabar 
coast of India, and even to the far Malay Is- 
lands, and returned home on the winter Mon- 
soon. Thus the Arab dhows sketched out a 
Sea-Empire, extending from the Straits of 
Gibraltar to the Straits of Malacca, from the 
Atlantic gate to the Pacific gate. 

This vast Saracen design of a northward and 
southward Dominion of camel-men crossed by 
a westward and eastward Dominion of shipmen 
was vitiated by one fatal defect; it lacked in its 



THE LANDSMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 117 

Arabian base the necessary man-power to make 
it good. But no student of the realities about 
which must turn the strategical thought of any 
government aspiring to world-power can afford 
to lose sight of the warning thus given by 
History. 



The Saracen Empire was overthrown, not 
from Europe or the Indies, but from the Heart- 
land in the north — a significant fact. Arabia 
is sea-girt or desert-girt in every other direction 
but towards the Heartland. The western sea- 
power of the Arabs was no doubt countered 
from Venice and Genoa, and their eastern 
sea-power was subdued by the Portuguese after 
they had rounded the Cape of Good Hope, but 
the downfall of the Saracens in Arabia itself was 
due to Turkish land-power. We must give some 
further consideration to the characteristics of 
the great Northern Heartland, and in the first 
place to those of the long Grassy Zone which, 
south of the Forest Zone, extends across its 
whole breadth, overlapping westward and east- 
ward some distance into the adjoining parts 
of the two Coastlands. 

The steppes begin in the center of Europe, 
where the Hungarian Plain is completely sur- 
rounded by a ring of forested mountains, the 



118 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

Eastern Alps and the Carpathians. 1 To-day 
fields of wheat and maize have in large part 
replaced the native grass, but a hundred years 
ago, before the railways had brought markets 
within reach, the sea-like levels of Hungary 
east of the Danube were a prairie land, and the 
wealth of the Hungarians was almost exclusively 
in horses and cattle. Beyond the forested 
barrier of the Carpathians begin the steppes of 
the main belt, spreading eastward, with the 
shore of the Black Sea to the south and the edge 
of the Russian Forest to the north. The forest 
edge crosses the Russian Plain sinuously, but 
in a generally oblique direction, from the north- 
ern end of the Carpathians in the fiftieth parallel 
of latitude to the foot of the Ural Range in the 
fifty-sixth parallel. Moscow stands a short way 
within the forest, where are the broad clearings 
which constituted all of inhabited Russia until 
the recent colonization of the steppe southward. 
As far as the Volga and the Don the wheat 
fields have now in large measure replaced the 
steppe grass, but until a hundred years ago the 
Cossack outposts of Russia were still based on 
the Dnieper and Don Rivers, the trees along 
whose banks alone broke the vast levels of 
waving grass or of snow. 

The forests which clothe the end of the Ural 

1 See Fig. 18, on p. 104. 



THE LANDSMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 119 

Mountains form a promontory southward into 
the open steppes, but the grass is continuous 
through the gateway of plain which leads from 
Europe into Asia between the Ural Range and 
the northern end of the Caspian Sea. Beyond 
this gateway the steppes expand again to even 
greater breadth than in Europe. To the north 
of them are still the forests, but to the south 
are now the deserts and sub -arid steppes of 
Turkestan. The Transiberian railway traverses 
the Grassy Zone from Chelyabinsk, the station 
at the eastern foot of the Ural Mountains where 
the lines from Petrograd and Moscow unite, to 
Irkutsk on the Angara River just below its exit 
from Lake Baikal. Wheat fields are beginning 
in large measure to replace the grass along the 
line of the railway, but the thread of settled 
population is still a narrow one, and the Tartar 
and Khirghiz horsemen are still nomad over 
wide areas. 

The edge of the forest bends southward 
along the boundary between Western and 
Eastern Siberia, for Eastern Siberia is filled 
with forested mountains and hills, which fall in 
elevation gradually from the Transbaikalian 
Plateau into the northeastern promontory of 
Asia towards Bering Strait. The Grassy Zone 
bends south with the forest and continues east- 
ward over the lower level of the Mongolian 



120 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

uplands. The slope upward from the Great 
Lowland into Mongolia is through the "Dry 
Strait" of Zungaria, between the Tianshan 
Mountains on the south and Altai Mountains 
on the north. Beyond Zungaria the steppes, 
now at upland level, continue round the south- 
ern edge of the forested Altai and Transbaik- 
alian Mountains, with the Gobi Desert to the 
south of them, until they reach the upper 
tributaries of the Amur River. There is a 
forest belt along the eastern, outward face of 
the Kingan Range, by which the Mongolian 
upland drops to the lowland of Manchuria, but 
there is a last detached grassland in Manchuria, 
to be compared with the similarly detached 
grassland of Hungary five thousand miles away 
at the west end of the steppe belt. Grassy 
Manchuria does not, however, extend through 
to the Pacific shore, for there a coast range of 
mountains, thickly forested, enframes the open 
country and deflects the eastward flowing Amur 
to a northward mouth. 

Let us clear this long ribbon of steppes of its 
modern railways and corn fields, and people it 
again in imagination with horse-riding Tartars, 
who are none other than Turks; it is said that 
the Turkish language of Constantinople can to 
this day be understood by the Arctic tribe at 
the mouth of the Lena River. For some recur- 



THE LANDSMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 121 

rent reason — it may have been owing to spells 
of droughty years — these Tartar mobile hordes 
have from time to time in the course of history 
gathered their whole strength together and 
fallen like a devastating avalanche upon the 
settled agricultural peoples either of China or 
Europe. In the West we hear of them first as 
the Huns, who in the middle of the fifth century 
after Christ rode into Hungary under a great 
but terrible leader, Attila. From Hungary 
they raided in three directions — northwest- 
ward, westward, and south west ward. North- 
westward they caused so much commotion 
among the Germans, that those tribes nearest 
the sea, the Angles and Saxons, were in part 
driven over the water to a new home in the 
island of Britain. Westward they penetrated 
far into Gaul, but were defeated in the great 
battle of Chalons, where the Frank, the Goth, 
and the Roman Provincial, standing shoulder 
to shoulder against the common enemy from 
the East, began that fusion from which has 
sprung the modern French people. South- 
westward Attila advanced as far as Milan, 
destroying on the way the important Roman 
cities of Aquileia and Padua, whose inhabitants 
fled to the lagoons by the sea and there founded 
Venice. At Milan Attila was met by Bishop 
Leo of Rome, and, for whatever reason, went 



m DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 



no farther, with the result that the Roman See 
won a great prestige. Thus can it be said with 
much truth that from the reaction of the coast- 
men against this hammer blow from the Heart- 




f o 



b £ 



Kief .-••••••.•.•-••.•;...:•.•.. •:•.;.•.• . • .* >*. 





Fig. 22. — Forest and Steppes in East Europe. (After a diagram in 
my paper on " The Geographical Pivot of History" in the Geographical 
Journal for 1904.) 

land, there arose the English and French na- 
tionalities, the sea-power of Venice, and the 
supreme mediaeval institution of the Papacy. 
Who shall say what great and, let us hope, 



THE LANDSMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 123 

beneficent things may not grow out of the re- 
action which has been compelled by the ham- 
mer blow of our modern Huns? 

The Hunnish raids ceased after a few years, 
for it is probable that the man-power behind 
them was not very considerable; the force of a 
blow may be due as much to its speed as to its 
weight. But some Hunnish remnants probably 
lingered in the grassy vacancy of the Hungarian 
Plain, to be absorbed by new tribes of horsemen 
advancing westward, the Avars, against whom 
Charlemagne made war, and presently the 
Magyars. In the year 1000 these Magyar 
Turks, who had done much ravaging in Germany 
during the previous century, were converted to 
Christianity from Rome, and became thence- 
forth some sort of a bulwark to Latin Christen- 
dom, so that no more Tartars were admitted 
into Hungary. But the economic life of the 
Magyars continued in the main to be that of 
the steppes until less than a hundred years ago. 

When we reflect that through several cen- 
turies of the Dark Ages the Norse pagans in 
their ships were at piracy on the northern seas, 
and the Saracen and Moorish infidels in their 
ships at piracy on the Mediterranean, and that 
the horse-riding Turks from Asia raided thus 
into the very heart of the Christian Peninsula 
when it was clasped by hostile sea-power, we 



124 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

have some idea of the pounding, as between 
pestle and mortar, which went to the making 
of modern Europe. The pestle was land-power 
from the Heartland. 



If these historical events be followed on the 
map, the strategical fact of decisive meaning 
which emerges is that the continuous plains of 
the Great Lowland overlap from the Conti- 
nental and Arctic drainage of the Heartland into 
the East of the European peninsula. There was 
no impediment to prevent the horsemen from 
riding westward into regions drained by such 
wholly European rivers as the Dnieper and 
Danube. In sharp contrast to this open pas- 
sage from the Heartland into Europe is the 
system of mighty barriers which separate the 
Heartland along its eastern and southeastern 
border from the Indies. The populous lands of 
China proper and India lie round the eastern 
and southern slopes of the most massive up- 
lands on the Globe; the southern face of the 
Himalaya Range, curving for 1500 miles along 
the north of India, rises from levels at most 
only 1000 feet above the sea to peaks of £8,000 
and 29,000 feet. But the Himalaya is only the 
edge of the Tibetan Plateau, which is as large 
as France, Germany, and Austria-Hungary put 



THE LANDSMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 125 

together, and of an average elevation of 15,000 
feet, or the peak height of Mont Blanc in the 
Alps. As compared with such facts as these, 
the distinction between the lower uplands and 
the lowlands, between the Iranian Upland, let 
us say, and the Great Lowland, becomes alto- 
gether subordinate. Tibet, with its attendant 
Himalaya, Pamirs, Karakoram, Hindu Kush, 
and Tianshan — call them together the Tibetan 
Heights — has no parallel on earth for combined 
height and area, or, in a single word, for mas- 
siveness. When the Sahara shall be crossed 
and recrossed daily by the traffic of civilization, 
it is probable that Tibet, the " roof of the world, " 
will still deflect round its flanks and widely 
separate the overland routes into China and 
India, thus giving a special significance to the 
Northwest Frontiers of those two countries. 

North of Tibet, a considerable part of which 
has a continental drainage, and is, therefore, 
included within the Heartland, spreads the 
Mongolian Upland, also largely of the Heart- 
land. This Mongolian Upland is of a much 
lower elevation than Tibet, and is in fact com- 
parable in point of level with the Iranian Up- 
land. Two natural ways come over the arid 
surface of Mongolia to drop down into the fertile 
lowland of China; the one through the Province 
of Kansu, round the northeastern corner of 



126 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

Tibet, to the great city of Sinan, of a million 
inhabitants; the other directly southeastward 
from Lake Baikal to Pekin, which city also has 
about a million inhabitants. Sinan and Pekin, 
thus just within the Chinese Lowland, are 
capitals founded by conquerors from the Heart- 
land. 

Across the Iranian Upland into India there 
are also two natural ways, the one over the lofty 
but narrow spine of the Hindu Kush, down the 
Cabul Valley, and over the terminal Kaibar 
Pass to the crossing of the Indus River at At- 
tock; the other through Herat and Kandahar, 
round the ends of the Afghan ridges, and by the 
Bolan Gorge down to the Indus. Immediately 
east of the Indus River is the Indian Desert, 
extending from the ocean to within a short 
distance of the Himalaya, and the Bolan and 
Kaibar ways converge, therefore, through the 
ante-chamber of the Punjab to the inner entry 
of India, which is the passage left between the 
desert and the mountains. Here stands Delhi, 
at the head of the navigation of the Jumna- 
Ganges, and Delhi is a capital founded, like 
Sinan and Pekin in China, by conquerors from 
the Heartland. By these narrow and difficult 
ways both China and India have repeatedly 
been invaded from the Heartland, but the Em- 
pires thus founded have usually soon become 



THE LANDSMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 127 

detached from the rule of the steppemen. So 
was it, for instance, with the Moguls of India, 
who were derived from the Mongols of the 
Interior. 



The conclusion to which this discussion leads 
is that the connection between the Heartland, 
and especially its more open western regions of 
Iran, Turkestan, and Siberia, is much more 
intimate with Europe and Arabia than it is 
with China and India, or yet with the Southern 
Heartland of Africa. The strong natural fron- 
tiers of the Sahara Desert and the Tibetan 
Heights have no equivalent where the Northern 
Heartland merges with Arabia and Europe. 
The close connection of these three regions is 
well typified by that geographical formula into 
which it was attempted to crystallize just now 
certain essential aspects of Mesopotamian and 
Syrian history; the plowmen of Mesopotamia 
and Syria have always been exposed to descents 
of the horsemen from the Heartland, of the 
camel-men from Arabia, and of the shipmen 
from Europe. None the less — and indeed just 
because of its more transitional character — the 
boundary between the Heartland on the one 
hand, and Arabia and Europe on the other, is 
worth following with some care. 







/V G ?**»* 




Fig. 23.— The Tibetan Heights and the approaches 








to China and India from the Heartland. 



130 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

The long range of the Persian Mountains 
bends westward round the upper end of Meso- 
potamia and becomes the Taurus Range, which 




Fig. 24. — The Heartland, with the addition of the basins of the Black 
and Baltic Seas, and of the uppermost (plateau) valleys of the Chinese 
and Indian rivers. 

is the high southern brink of the peninsular 
upland of Asia Minor. The surface of Asia 
Minor is a patch of steppes, verging on desert 
in the center, where salt lakes receive some of 
the streams from the Taurus; but the larger 



THE LANDSMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 131 

rivers flow northward to the Black Sea. Be- 
yond the break made by the iEgean Sea, we 
have the great basin of the Danube, also drain- 
ing into the Black Sea; the head-streams of the 
Danube tributaries rise almost within sight of 
the Adriatic, but high on those Illyrian Uplands 
whose steep outer brink forms the mountain 
wall above the beautiful Dalmatian coast. 
That wall we name the Dinaric Alps. 

Thus the Taurus and the Dinaric Alps pre- 
sent steep fronts to the Mediterranean and 
Adriatic, but send long rivers down to the Black 
Sea. But for the iEgean Sea, breaking through 
the uplands towards the Black Sea, and but for 
the Dardanelles, whose current races southward 
with the water of all the Black Sea rivers, these 
high, outward fronts of the Taurus and Dinaric 
Alps would be a single curving range, the edge 
of a continuous bar of land dividing the inner 
Black Sea from the outer Mediterranean and 
Adriatic. Were it not for the Dardanelles that 
edge would form the border of the Heartland, 
and the Black Sea and all its rivers would be 
added to the "Continental" systems of drain- 
age. When the Dardanelles are closed by land- 
power to the sea-power of the Mediterranean, 
as they have been in the Great War, that con- 
dition of things is in effect realized so far as 
human movements are concerned. 



THE LANDSMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 133 

The Roman Emperors put their Eastern 
capital at Constantinople, midway between the 
Danube and Euphrates frontiers, but Constan- 
tinople was to them more than the bridge-town 
from Europe into Asia. Rome, the Mediter- 
ranean Power, did not annex the northern shore 
of the Black Sea, and that sea, therefore, was 
itself a part of the frontier of the Empire. The 
steppes were left to the Scythians, as the Turks 
were then called, and at most a few trading 
stations were dotted by the seamen along the 
coast of the Crimea. Thus Constantinople was 
the point from which Mediterranean sea-power 
held the middle sea-frontier, as the land-power 
of the Legions held the western and eastern 
frontiers along the rivers. Under Rome, sea- 
power thus advanced into the Heartland, if 
that term be understood, in a large, a strategi- 
cal sense, as including Asia Minor and the 
Balkan Peninsula. 

Later history is no less transparent to the 
underlying facts of geography, but in the in- 
verse direction. Some of the Turks from Cen- 
tral Asia turned aside from the way down into 
Arabia, and rode over the Median and Armenian 
uplands into the open steppe of Asia Minor, 
and there made their home, just as the Magyar 
Turks only a century or two earlier rode round 
the north of the Black Sea into the Hungarian 



134 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

Steppe. Under great leaders of cavalry of the 
Ottoman dynasty, these Turks crossed the 
Dardanelles, and, following the "Corridor" of 
the Maritza and Morava valleys through the 
Balkan Mountains, achieved the conquest of 
Magyar Hungary itself. From the moment 
that the city of Constantinople fell into Turkish 
hands in 1453, the Black Sea was closed to the 
Venetian and Genoese seamen. Under Rome, 
the realm of the seamen had been advanced to 
the northern shore of the Black Sea; under the 
Ottoman Turks the Heartland, the realm of the 
horsemen, was advanced to the Dinaric Alps 
and the Taurus. This essential fact has been 
masked by the extension of Turkish dominion 
into Arabia outside the Heartland; but it is 
evident again to-day when Britain has recon- 
quered Arabia for the Arabs. Within the 
Heartland, the Black Sea has of late been the 
path of strategical design eastward for our 
German enemy. 

We defined the Heartland originally in accord- 
ance with river drainage; but does not history, 
as thus recounted, show that for the purposes 
of strategical thought it should be given a some- 
what wider extension? Regarded from the 
point of view of human mobility, and of the 
different modes of mobility, it is evident that 
since land-power can to-day close the Black 



THE LANDSMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 135 

Sea, the whole basin of that sea must be re- 
garded as of the Heartland. Only the Bavarian 
Danube, of very little value for navigation, may 
be treated as lying outside. 

One more circumstance remains to be added, 
and we shall have before us the w T hole conception 
of the Heartland as it emerges from the facts 
of geography and history. The Baltic is a sea 
which can now be "closed" by land-power. 
The fact that the German Fleet at Kiel was 
responsible for the mines and submarines which 
kept the Allied squadrons from entering the 
Baltic does not, of course, in any way vitiate 
the statement that the closing was by land- 
power; the Allied Armies in France were there 
by virtue of sea-power, and the German sea 
defenses of the Baltic were there as a result of 
land-power. It is of prime importance in re- 
gard to any terms of peace which are to guaran- 
tee us against future war that we should recog- 
nize that under the conditions of to-day, as was 
admitted by responsible Ministers in the House 
of Commons, the Fleets of the Islanders could 
no more penetrate into the Baltic than they 
could into the Black Sea. 

The Heartland, for the purposes of strategical 
thinking, includes the Baltic Sea, the navigable 
Middle and Lower Danube, the Black Sea, 
Asia Minor, Armenia, Persia, Tibet, and Mon- 



136 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

golia. Within it, therefore, were Branden- 
burg-Prussia and Austria-Hungary, as well as 
Russia — a vast triple base of man-power, which 
was lacking to the horse-riders of history. The 
Heartland is the region to which, under modern 
conditions, sea-power can be refused access, 
though the western part of it lies without the 
region of Arctic and Continental drainage. 
There is one striking physical circumstance 
which knits it graphically together; the whole 
of it, even to the brink of the Persian Mountains 
overlooking torrid Mesopotamia, lies under 
snow in the winter time. The line indicative 
of an average freezing temperature for the whole 
month of January passes from the North Cape 
of Norway southward, just within the "Guard" 
of islands along the Norwegian shore, past 
Denmark, across Mid-Germany to the Alps, 
and from the Alps eastward along the Balkan 
range. The Bay of Odessa and the Sea of Azof 
are frozen over annually, and also the greater 
part of the Baltic Sea. At mid- winter, as seen 
from the moon, a vast white shield would reveal 
the Heartland in its largest meaning. 

When the Russian Cossacks first policed the 
steppes at the close of the Middle Ages, a great 
revolution was effected, for the Tartars, like 
the Arabs, had lacked the necessary man-power 
upon which to found a lasting Empire, but 



THE LANDMAN'S POINT OF VIEW 137 

behind the Cossacks were the Russian plough- 
men, who have to-day grown to be a people of 
a hundred millions on the fertile plains between 
the Black and Baltic Seas. During the nine- 
teenth century, the Russian Czardom loomed 
large within the great Heartland, and seemed 
to threaten all the marginal lands of Asia and 
Europe. Towards the end of the century, 
however, the Germans of Prussia and Austria 
determined to subdue the Slavs and to exploit 
them for the occupation of the Heartland, 
through which run the land-ways into China, 
India, Arabia, and the African Heartland. The 
German military colonies of Kiauchau and 
East Africa were established as termini of the 
projected overland routes. 

To-day armies have at their disposal not 
only the Trans-Continental Railway but also 
the Motor-Car. They have, too, the Aeroplane, 
which is of a boomerang nature, a weapon of 
land-power as against sea-power. Modern ar- 
tillery, moreover, is very formidable against 
ships. In short, a great military power in 
possession of the Heartland and of Arabia 
could take easy possession of the cross-ways of 
the world at Suez. Sea-power would have 
found it very difficult to hold the Canal if a 
fleet of submarines had been based from the 
beginning of the war on the Black Sea. We 




Fig. 26.— The World-Island united, as it soon will be, by 

part parallel with 




railways, and by aeroplane routes, the latter for the most 
the main railways. 



140 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

have defeated the danger on this occasion, but 
the facts of geography remain, and offer ever- 
increasing strategical opportunities to land- 
power as against sea-power. 

It is evident that the Heartland is as real a 
physical fact within the World-Island as is the 
World-Island itself within the Ocean, although 
its boundaries are not quite so clearly defined. 
Not until about a hundred years ago, however, 
was there available a base of man-power suffi- 
cient to begin to threaten the liberty of the 
world from within this citadel of the World- 
Island. No mere scraps of paper, even though 
they be the written constitution of a League of 
Nations, are under the conditions of to-day a 
sufficient guarantee that the Heartland will not 
again become the center of a World-War. Now 
is the time, when the Nations are fluid, to con- 
sider what guarantees, based on Geographical 
and Economic Realities, can be made available 
for the future security of Mankind. With this 
in view, it will be worth our while to see how 
the storm gathered in the Heartland on the 
present occasion. 



V 

THE RIVALRY OF EMPIRES 

A most interesting parallel might be drawn 
between the advance of the sailors over the 
ocean from Western Europe and the contem- 
porary advance of the Russian Cossacks across 
the steppes of the Heartland. Yermak, the 
Cossack, rode over the Ural Mountains into 
Siberia in 1533, within a dozen years, that is to 
say, after Magellan's voyage round the world. 
The parallel might be repeated in regard to our 
own days. It was an unprecedented thing in 
the year 1900 that Britain should maintain a 
quarter of a million men in her war with the 
Boers at a distance of 6000 miles over the ocean; 
but it was as remarkable a feat for Russia to 
place an army of more than a quarter of a mil- 
lion men against the Japanese in Manchuria in 
1904 at a distance of 4000 miles by rail. We 
have been in the habit of thinking that mobility 
by sea far outran mobility upon the land, and 
so for a time it did, but it is well to remember 
that fifty years ago 90 per cent, of the world's 
shipping was still moved by sails, and that 
already the first railway had been opened 
across North America. 

141 



142 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

One of the reasons why we commonly fail to 
appreciate the significance of the policing of the 
steppes by the Cossacks is that we think vaguely 
of Russia as extending, with a gradually dimin- 
ishing density of settlement, from the German 
and Austrian frontiers for thousands of miles 
eastward, over all the area colored on the map 
with one tint and labeled as one country, as 
far as Bering Strait. In truth Russia — the 
real Russia which supplied more than 80 per 
cent, of the recruits for the Russian armies 
during the first three years of the War — is a 
very much smaller fact than the simplicity of 
the map would seem to indicate. The Russia 
which is the homeland of the Russian people, 
lies wholly in Europe, and occupies only about 
half of what we commonly call Russia in Europe. 
The land boundaries of Russia in this sense are 
in many places almost as definite as are the 
coasts of France or Spain. Trace a line on the 
map from Petrograd eastward along the Upper 
Volga to the great bend of the river at Kazan, 
and thence southward along the Middle Volga 
to the second great bend at Czaritzin, and 
finally southwestward along the lower river 
Don to Rostof and the Sea of Azof. Within 
this line, to south and west of it, are more 
than a hundred million Russian people. They, 
the main stock of Russia, inhabit the plain 



THE RIVALRY OF EMPIRES 143 

between the Volga and the Carpathians and 
between the Baltic and Black Seas, with an 
average density of perhaps 150 to the square 
mile, and this continuous sheet of population 
ends more or less abruptly along the line which 
has been indicated. 

Northward of Petrograd and Kazan is North 
Russia, a vast somber forest land with occa- 
sional marshes, more than half as large as all 
the region just defined as the Russian Homeland. 
North Russia has a population of less than two 
millions, or not three to the square mile. East 
of the Volga and Don, as far as the Ural Moun- 
tains and the Caspian Sea, lies East Russia, 
about as large as North Russia, and with a 
population also of about two millions. But in 
the Kama Valley, between North and East 
Russia, is a belt of settled country, extending 
eastward from Kazan and Samara to the Ural 
Range, and over that range, past the mines of 
Ekaterinburg, into Siberia, and right across 
Western Siberia to Irkutsk, just short of Lake 
Baikal. This belt of population beyond the 
Volga numbers perhaps twenty millions. The 
whole of it, from Kazan and Samara to Irkutsk, 
in so far as it is occupied by plowmen and not 
by wandering horsemen, is of recent settlement. 

The Middle Volga, flowing southward from 
Kazan to Czaritzin, is a remarkable moat not 



144 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

only to Russia but to Europe. The west shore, 
known as the Hill Bank, in opposition to the 
Meadow Bank on the other side, is a hill face, 




Fig. 27. — Showing the limits of the denser Russian 
population — — . 

some hundred feet high, which overlooks the 
river for 700 miles; it is the brink of the inhabited 
plain, here a little raised above the sea level. 
Stand on the top of this brink, looking eastward 



THE RIVALRY OF EMPIRES 145 

across the broad river below you, and you will 
realize that you have populous Europe at your 
back, and in front, where the low meadows fade 
away into the half sterility of the drier steppes 
eastward, you have the beginning of the vacan- 
cies of Central Asia. 

A striking practical commentary on these 
great physical and social contrasts has been 
supplied in the last few months by the Civil 
War in Russia. In all North Russia there are 
but two or three towns larger than a village, 
and, since the Bolsheviks are based on the town 
populations, Bolshevism has had little hold 
north of the Volga. Moreover the sparse rural 
settlements, chiefly of foresters, have, in their 
simple, colonial conditions, no grounds for 
agrarian political feeling, and there is thus no 
peasant sympathy for the Bolsheviks. As a 
result, the railway from Archangel to Vologda 
on the Upper Dwina long remained open for 
communication with the ocean and the West. 
The Transiberian line runs from Petrograd 
through Vologda, and there is a direct line from 
Moscow to Vologda which may be considered 
as leaving Russia proper and entering North 
Russia at the bridge over the Volga at Jaroslav. 
For these reasons it was that the Allied Em- 
bassies established themselves at Vologda when 
they retired from Petrograd and Moscow: 



146 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

apart from the convenience of alternative com- 
munications with Archangel and Vladivostok, 
they were outside Bolshevik Russia. 

Even more significant was the action of the 
Czecho-Slovaks on the Moscow branch of the 
Transiberian line. Advancing from the Ural 
Mountains, with the support of the Ural Cos- 
sacks, they took Samara at the point where the 
railway reaches the Meadow Bank, and they 
seized the great bridge over the river at Syzran. 
They even penetrated a short way along the 
line to Penza within the real Russia, but through 
a rather sparsely -populated neighborhood. Also, 
they struck up the river to Kazan. In truth 
they were thus hovering round the edge of the 
real Russia and threatening it from outside. 
The British expedition from Archangel by boat 
up the Dwina River to Kotlas, and thence by 
railway to Vyatka on the Transiberian line, 
appears a less foolhardy enterprise when seen 
in the light of these realities. 

This definition of the real Russia gives a new 
meaning not only to the Russia but also to the 
Europe of the nineteenth century. Let us con- 
sider that Europe, with the help of the map. 
All the more northern regions of Scandinavia, 
Finland, and Russia, and also East Russia 
southward to the Caucasus, are excluded as 
being mere vacancies, and with them the 



THE RIVALRY OF EMPIRES 147 

Turkish dominion in the Balkan Peninsula. 
It will be remembered that Kinglake in Eothen, 
writing in 1844, considered that he was entering 
the East when he was ferried across the river 
Save to Belgrade. The boundary between the 
Austrian and Turkish Empires as settled by 
the Treaty of Belgrade in 1739, was not varied 
until 1878. Thus the real Europe, the Europe 
of the European peoples, the Europe which, 
with its overseas Colonies, is Christendom, was 
a perfectly definite social conception; its land- 
ward boundary ran straight from Petrograd to 
Kazan, and then along a curved line from Kazan 
by the Volga and Don Rivers to the Black Sea, 
and by the Turkish frontier to near the head 
of the Adriatic. At the one end of this Europe 
is Cape St. Vincent standing out to sea; at the 
other end is the land cape formed by the Volga 
elbow at Kazan. Berlin is almost exactly mid- 
way between St. Vincent and Kazan. Had 
Prussia won this War it was her intention that 
Continental Europe from St. Vincent to Kazan, 
with the addition of the Asiatic Heartland, 
should have become the naval base from which 
she would have fought Britain and America in 
the next war. 

Let us now divide our Europe into East and 
West by a line so drawn from the Adriatic to 
the North Sea that Venice and the Netherlands 



148 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

may He to the west, and also that part of Ger- 
many which has been German from the begin- 
ning of European history, but so that Berlin and 
Vienna are to the east, for Prussia and Austria 




Fig. 28.— The real Europe, East and West, with the addition of Bar- 
bary, the Balkans, and Asia Minor (see pp. 153, 154). 

are countries which the German has conquered 
and more or less forcibly Teutonized. On the 
map thus divided let us "think through" the 
history of the last four generations; it will 
assume a new coherency. 

******* 

The English Revolution limited the powers 
of Monarchy, and the French Revolution as- 



THE RIVALRY OF EMPIRES 149 

serted the rights of the people. Owing to dis- 
order in France, and her invasion from abroad, 
the organizer Napoleon was thrown up. Napo- 
leon conquered Belgium and Switzerland, sur- 
rounded himself with subsidiary kings in Spain, 
Italy, and Holland, and made an alliance with 
the subordinate Federation of the Rhine, or, 
in other words, with the old Germany. Thus 
Napoleon had united the whole of West Europe, 
saving only insular Britain. Then he advanced 
against East Europe, and defeated Austria and 
Prussia, but did not annex them, though he 
compelled them to act as his allies when he 
afterwards went forward against Russia. We 
often hear of the vast spaces for Russian retreat 
which lay behind Moscow; but, in fact, Napo- 
leon at Moscow had very nearly marched right 
across the inhabited Russia of his time. 1 Na- 
poleon was brought down partly by the exhaus- 
tion of his French man-power, but mainly 
because his realm of West Europe was enveloped 
by British sea-power, for Britain was able to 
bring to herself supplies from outside Europe 
and to cut West Europe off from similar supplies. 
Naturally she allied herself with the Powers of 
East Europe, but there was only one way by 
which she could effectively communicate with 

1 And therefore across the territory which could afford supplies to 
the contending armies. 



150 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

them, and that was through the Baltic. This 
explains her naval action twice at Copenhagen. 
Owing to her command of the sea, Britain was, 
however, able to land her armies in Holland, 
Spain, and Italy, and to sap the Napoleonic 
strength in rear. It is interesting to note that 
the culminating victory of Trafalgar and the 
turning-point of Moscow lay very nearly at the 
two extremes of our real Europe. The Napo- 
leonic War was a duel between West and East 
Europe, whose areas and populations were about 
evenly balanced, but the superiority due to 
the higher civilization of West Europe was 
neutralized by British sea-power. 

After Waterloo, East Europe was united by the 
Holy League of the three Powers — Russia, 
Austria and Prussia. Each of the three advanced 
westward a stage, as though drawn by a magnet 
in that direction. Russia obtained most of Po- 
land, and thus extended a political peninsula into 
the heart of the physical peninsula of Europe. 
Austria took the Dalmatian coast, and also Ven- 
ice and Milan in the mainland of Northern Italy. 
Prussia obtained a detached territory in the old 
Germany of the West, which territory was di- 
vided into the two provinces of the Rhineland 
and Westphalia. This annexation of Germans to 
Prussia proved to be a much more significant 
thing than the addition of Poles to Russia and of 



THE RIVALRY OF EMPIRES 151 

Italians to Austria. The Rhineland is an an- 
ciently civilized country, and so far Western that 
it accepted the Code Napoleon for its law, which 
it still retains. From the moment that the Prus- 
sians thus forced their way into West Europe a 
struggle became inevitable between the Lib- 
eral Rhineland and the Conservative Branden- 
burg of Berlin. But that struggle was post- 
poned for a time owing to the exhaustion of 
Europe. 

British naval power continued the while to en- 
velop West Europe from Heligoland, Portsmouth, 
Plymouth, Gibraltar, and Malta. By changes 
precipitated in the years 1830 to 1832 the tem- 
porary reaction in the West was brought to an 
end, and the middle classes came into power in 
Britain, France and Belgium. In the years from 
1848 to 1850 the democratic movement spread 
eastward of the Rhine, and Central Europe was 
ablaze with the ideas of freedom and nationality, 
but from our point of view two events, and two 
only, were decisive. In 1849 the Russian Armies 
advanced into Hungary and put the Magyars 
back into their subjection to Vienna, thereby en- 
abling the Austrians to reassert their supremacy 
over the Italians and Bohemians. In 1850 took 
place that fatal conference at Olmlitz when Russia 
and Austria refused to allow the King of Prussia 
to accept the All-German Crown which had been 



152 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

offered to him from Frankfurt in the West. Thus 
the continuing unity of East Europe was asserted, 
and the Liberal movement from the Rhineland 
was definitely balked. 

In 1860 Bismarck, who had been at Frankfurt, 
and who had also been Ambassador in Paris and 
Petrograd, was called to power at Berlin, and re- 
solved to base German unity not on the idealism 
of Frankfurt and the West, but on the organiza- 
tion of Berlin and the East. In 1864 and 1866 
Berlin overran West Germany, annexing Han- 
over and thereby opening the way into the Rhine- 
land for Junker militarism. At the same time 
Berlin weakened her competitor Austria by help- 
ing the Magyar to establish the dual government 
of Austria-Hungary, and by depriving Austria of 
Venice. France had previously recovered Milan 
for the West. The War of 1866 between Prussia 
and Austria was, however, in essence merely a 
Civil War; this became evident in 1872 when 
Prussia, having shown that her power was irresist- 
ible in the War against France, formed the League 
of the Three Emperors, and thus reconstituted 
for a time the East Europe of the Holy Alliance. 
The center of power in East Europe was now, 
however, Prussia, and no longer Russia, and East 
Europe had established a considerable Rhenish 
"Glacis" against West Europe. 

For some fifteen years after the Franco-Prussian 



THE RIVALRY OF EMPIRES 153 

War Bismarck ruled both East and West Europe. 
He ruled the West by dividing the three Romance 
Powers of France, Italy and Spain. This he 
accomplished in regard to their relations to 
Barbary, the "Island of the West" of the Arabs. 
France had taken the central portion of Barbary, 
known as Algeria, and by encouraging her to 
extend her dominion eastward into Tunis and 
westward into Morocco, Bismarck brought her 
interests into conflict with those of Italy and 
Spain. In East Europe there was a somewhat 
similar rivalry between Russia and Austria in 
respect of the Balkan Peninsula, but here the 
effort of Bismarck was to hold his two allies to- 
gether. Therefore, after making the Dual Alli- 
ance with Austria in 1878, Bismarck negotiated 
his secret Reinsurance Treaty with Russia. He 
desired a solid East Europe under Prussian con- 
trol, but a divided West Europe. 



The events which we have thus briefly called to 
mind are no mere past and dead history. They 
show the fundamental opposition between East 
and West Europe, an opposition which becomes 
of world-significance when we remember that the 
line through Germany which History indicates 
as the frontier between East and West is the very 
line which we have on other grounds taken as de- 



154 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

marking the Heartland in the strategical sense 
from the Coastland. 

In West Europe there are two principal ele- 
ments, the Romance and the Teutonic. As far 
as the two chief nations, Britain and France, are 
concerned, there is and can be in modern times 
no question of conquest of the one by the other. 
The Channel lies between them. Away back in 
the Middle Ages it is true that for three centuries 
French Knights ruled England, and that for an- 
other century the English tried to rule France. 
But those relations ended for good when Queen 
Mary lost Calais. The great wars between the 
two countries in the eighteenth century were 
waged primarily to prevent the French Mon- 
archy from dominating the Continent of Europe. 
For the rest, they were wars of colonial and com- 
mercial rivalry. So far, also, as the Teutonic ele- 
ment along the Rhine is concerned, there was cer- 
tainly in the past no very deep-seated hostility to 
the French. The Alsatians, though German by 
speech, became — it is one of the great facts of 
history operative to this day — French in heart. 
Even what is now the Rhine province of Prussia 
accepted, as we have seen, the Code Napoleon. 

In East Europe there are also two principal 
elements, the Teutonic and the Slavonic, but no 
equilibrium has been established between them 
as between the Romance and Teutonic elements 



THE RIVALRY OF EMPIRES 155 

of West Europe. The key to the whole situation 
in East Europe— ^and it is a fact which cannot be 
too clearly laid to heart at the present moment — 
is the German claim to dominance over the Slav. 
Vienna and Berlin, just beyond the boundary of 
West Europe, stand already within territory that 
was Slav in the earlier Middle Ages ; they repre- 
sent the first step of the German out of his native 
country as a conqueror eastward. In the time of 
Charlemagne the rivers Saale and Elbe divided 
the Slavs from the Germans, and to this day, only 
a short distance south of Berlin, is the Circle of 
Kottbus, where the peasantry still speak Wend- 
ish, or the Slav tongue of all the region a few cen- 
turies ago. Outside this little Wendish remnant, 
the Slav peasantry have accepted the language 
of the German Barons who rule them in their 
large estates. In South Germany, where the 
peasantry is truly German, the land is held by 
small proprietors. 

No doubt there is a difference of impression 
made on foreigners by the Austrians and by the 
Prussians of noble birth; that difference comes, 
no doubt, from the fact that the Austrians ad- 
vanced eastward from South German homes, 
whereas the Prussians came from the harsher 
North. But in Prussia and Austria alike, the 
great landowners were autocrats before the War, 
though we commonly think of the Junker as 



156 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

Prussian only. The peasantry of both countries 
was in a state of serfdom until a comparatively 
short time ago. 

The two long limbs of territory thrust out by 
Prussia in northeasterly and southeasterly di- 




Fig. 29. — The surviving islands of Wendish (Slavonic) speech at 
Kottbus, encircled by the flowing tide of German speech. 

rections have a deep historical meaning for those 
who read history on the map, and it is history on 
the map which constitutes one of the great re- 
alities with which we must deal in our Recon- 
struction. The map showing the distribution of 
languages tells in this instance even more than 



THE RIVALRY OF EMPIRES 157 

the political map, for it shows three tongues of 
German speech and not merely two. The first 
lies northeastward along the Baltic Shore; it rep- 
resents a German conquest and forced Teuton- 
ization of the later Middle Ages. By the coast- 
wise water way the Hanseatic Merchants of 
Ltibeck and the Teutonic Knights, no longer oc- 
cupied in Crusading, conquered all the shorelands 
to where now stands Petrograd. By subsequent 
history half of this strip of " Deutschthum " was 
incorporated with the Berlin Monarchy, and the 
other half became the Baltic Provinces of the 
Russian Czardom. But the Baltic Provinces re- 
tained, to our days, their German merchant com- 
munity of Riga, their German University of 
Dorpat, and their German Barons as landlords. 
Under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk the German 
element was again to have ruled in these lands of 
Courland and Livonia. 

The second pathway of the Germans was up the 
Oder River to its source in the Moravian Gate 
the deep valley leading from Poland towards 
Vienna between the mountains of Bohemia on the 
one hand, and the Carpathian Mountains on the 
other hand. The German settlements along the 
Upper Oder became Silesia, of which the greater 
part was taken from Austria by Prussia under 
Frederick the Great. The salience of these north- 
eastward and southeastward limbs of German- 



THE RIVALRY OF EMPIRES 159 

speaking country is still further accentuated by 
the Polish-speaking Prussian province of Posen 
in the reentering angle between them. 

The third eastward path of the Germans was 
down the Danube, and by southward passes 
also into the Eastern Alps. This has become 
the Austrian Archduchy about Vienna, and the 
Carinthian Duchy — German-speaking — in the 
Austrian Alps. Between the Silesian and Aus- 
trian Germans projects westward the province 
of Bohemia, mainly of Slav speech. Let us not 
forget that Posen and Bohemia have retained 
their native tongues, and that the three salients 
of German speech represent three streams of 
conquest. 

Beyond even the utmost points of these three 
principal invasions of Deutschthum, there are 
many scattered German colonies of farmers and 
miners, some of them of very recent origin. 
They occur at many points in Hungary, al- 
though for political purposes the Germans have 
there now very much identified themselves 
with the Magyar tyranny. The Saxons in 
Transylvania share with the Magyars of that 
region a privileged position amid a subject 
population of Rumanian peasants. 1 In Russia 

1 The statements here made are left in the form that held before the 
War, for the memory of them is more potent than the as yet vague re- 
grouping of the future. 



160 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

a chain of German settlements lies eastward 
through the north of the Ukraine almost to 
Kieff. Only on the Middle Volga, about the 
city of Saratof, do we come to the last patch 
of these German colonists. 

We must not, however, think of German 
influence among the Slavs as being limited to 
these extensions of the German tongue, though 
they are a very powerful factor — since German 
Kultur has gone wherever the German language 
has given it entry. The Slav kingdom of Bo- 
hemia was completely incorporated into the 
German Imperial System; the King of Bohemia 
was one of the Electors of the Emperor under 
the constitution which came to an end only in 
1806, after the battle of Austerlitz. The Poles, 
the Czechs, the South Slavs of Croatia, and the 
Magyars are Roman Catholic — that is to say, 
of the Latin or Western branch of the Church, 
and this has certainly meant an extension of 
German influence as against the Greek Church 
of the Russians. After the siege of Vienna in 
1683, the Austrian Germans advanced step by 
step in the eighteenth century, driving the 
Turks before them from Hungary, until by the 
Treaty of Belgrade in 1739 they fixed the line 
which, for more than a hundred years, after- 
wards delimited Turkish power towards Chris- 
tendom. Undoubtedly the Austrians thus ren- 



THE RIVALRY OF EMPIRES 161 

dered a great service to Europe, but the inci- 
dental effect, so far as the Croatians, Magyars, 
Slovaks, and Rumanians of Transylvania were 
concerned, was merely to substitute the mastery 
of the German for that of the Turk. When 
Peter the Great of Russia moved his capital at 
the beginning of the eighteenth century from 
Moscow to Petrograd, he went from a Slavonic 
to a German environment, a fact recorded in 
the German name St. Petersburg. As a conse- 
quence, throughout the eighteenth and nine- 
teenth centuries, German influence was great 
in Russian Government. The Russian bureau- 
cracy, on which the Czardom depended, was, 
in large measure, recruited from among the 
cadets of the German baronial families of the 
Baltic provinces. 

Thus East Europe has not consisted, like 
West Europe, of a group of peoples independent 
of one another, and — until Alsace was taken by 
Prussia — without serious frontier questions be- 
tween them; East Europe has been a great 
triple organization of German domination over 
a mainly Slavonic population, though the extent 
of the German power, no doubt, varied in 
different parts. In this fact we have the key to 
the meaning of the volte-face of 1895, when was 
concluded the incongruous Franco-Russian alli- 
ance between Democracy and Despotism. 



162 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

When Russia allied herself with France against 
the Germans, much more was implied than 
merely a reshuffling of the cards on the play- 
table of Europe. Something fundamental had 
happened in East Europe from the point of view 
of Berlin. Prior to that great and significant 
event there had been long bickerings between 
the Russian and Austrian Governments as the 
result of their rivalry in the Balkans, but these 
were in the nature of family quarrels, no less 
than was the short war between Prussia and 
Austria in 1866. When Russia advanced to the 
Danube against Turkey in 1853 and Austria 
massed forces to threaten her from the Carpa- 
thians, the friendship of the Holy Alliance, 
which had subsisted since 1815, was, no doubt, 
suspended until Bismarck brought the three 
despotisms together again in his Three-Kaiser 
Alliance of 1872. But it so happened that, 
during the interval, Russia was not in a position 
to advance afresh against the Turks, owing to 
the losses which she had experienced in the 
Crimean War, and therefore no irremediable 
breach ensued between her and Austria. But 
the Three-Kaiser Alliance could not last long 
after Austria had given notice of her Balkan 
ambitions by occupying the Slav Provinces of 
Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1878. Some un- 
comfortable years followed, during which Ger- 



THE RIVALRY OF EMPIRES 163 

man strength was mounting up, before Russia 
was convinced that the alternative before her 
was either an alliance with the French Republi- 
cans or the acceptance of a position of subordi- 
nation to Germany, like that to which Austria 
had been reduced. 



So much in regard to the history of West and 
East Europe during the Victorian Age. There 
was, however, a contemporary history of the 
Not-Europe which we must now bring into our 
reckoning. The Naval warfare which culmin- 
ated in the battle of Trafalgar had the effect of 
dividing the stream of the world's history into 
two separate currents for nearly a century. 
Britain enveloped Europe with her sea-power, 
but save in so far as it was necessary at times 
for her to intervene around the Eastern Med- 
iterranean because of her stake in the Indies, 
she took no serious part in the politics of the 
European Peninsula. British sea-power, how- 
ever, also enveloped the great world promontory 
which ends in the Cape of Good Hope, and, 
operating from the sea-front of the Indies, came 
into rivalry with the Russian-Cossack Power, 
then gradually completing its hold on the 
Heartland. In the far north the Russians 
descended the great Amur River to the Pacific 



164 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

Coast before the Crimean War. It is usual to 
attribute the opening of Japan to the action of 
the American Commodore Perry in 1853, but 
the presence of the Russians in the island of 
Sakhalin, and even as far south as Hakodate in 
Yesso, had done something to prepare the way. 
In regard to Britain, the most immediate Rus- 
sian menace was, of course, beyond the North- 
west Frontier of India. 

In the nineteenth century Britain did what 
she liked upon the Ocean, for the United States 
were not yet powerful, and Europe was fully 
occupied with its wars. Shipping and markets 
were the objective of the Nation of Shopkeepers 
under the regime of the Manchester School of 
political thought. The principal new markets 
offering were among the vast populations of the 
Indies, for Africa was unexplored, and for the 
most part went naked, and the Americas were 
not yet populous. Therefore, while Britain 
might have annexed almost every coast outside 
Europe except the Atlantic coast of the United 
States, she limited herself to calling ports for 
her shipping on the ocean road to the Indies, 
and to such colonial developments in unoccupied 
regions as were forced on her by her own ad- 
venturers, whom she tried in vain to check. 
But she was compelled to make a steady ad- 
vance in India, of that kind which old Rome 



THE RIVALRY OF EMPIRES 165 

had known so well, when one new province 
after another was annexed for the purpose of 
depriving invaders of their bases against the 
territory already possessed. 

The map reveals at once the essential stra- 
tegic aspects of the rivalry between Russia and 
Britain during the nineteenth century. Russia, 
in command of nearly the whole of the Heart- 
land, was knocking at the landward gates of 
the Indies. Britain, on the other hand, was 
knocking at the sea gates of China, and advanc- 
ing inland from the sea gates of India to meet 
the menace from the northwest. Russian rule 
in the Heartland was based on her man-power 
in East Europe, and was carried to the gates of 
the Indies by the mobility of the Cossack 
cavalry. British power along the sea frontage 
of the Indies was based on the man-power of 
the distant islands in West Europe, and was 
made available in the East by the mobility of 
British ships. Obviously there were two criti- 
cal points in the alternative voyages round from 
West to East; those points we know to-day as 
the "Cape" and the "Canal." The Cape lay 
far removed from all overland threat through- 
out the nineteenth century; practically South 
Africa was an island. The Canal was not opened 
until 1869, but its construction was an event 
which cast its shadow before. It was the French- 



166 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

man, Napoleon, who gave to Egypt, and there- 
fore also to Palestine, its modern importance, 
just as it was the Frenchman Dupleix, who, 
in the eighteenth century, showed that it was 
possible to build an empire in India from the 
coast inward, on the ruins of the Mogul Empire 
which had been built from Delhi outward. 
Both ideas, that of Napoleon and that of 
Dupleix, were essentially ideas of sea-power, 
and sprang not unnaturally from France in the 
Peninsula of West Europe. By his expedition 
to Egypt Napoleon drew the British Fleet to 
the battle of the Nile in the Mediterranean, 
and also drew the British Army from India, for 
the first time, overseas to the Nile Valley. 
When, therefore, Russian power in the Heart- 
land increased, the eyes both of Britain and 
France were necessarily directed towards Suez, 
those of Britain for obvious practical reasons, 
and those of France partly for the sentimental 
reason of the great Napoleonic tradition, but 
also because the freedom of the Mediterranean 
was essential to her comfort in the Western 
Peninsula. 

But Russian land-power did not reach, in 
the eyes of people of that time, as far as to 
threaten Arabia. The natural European exit 
from the Heartland was by the sea-way through 
the Straits of Constantinople. We have seen 



THE RIVALRY OF EMPIRES 167 

how Rome drew her frontier through the Black 
Sea, and made Constantinople a local base of 
her Mediterranean sea-power against the Scyth- 
ians of the steppes. Russia, under Czar Nicholas, 
sought to invert this policy, and, by command- 
ing the Black Sea and its southward exit, aimed 
at extending her land-power to the Dardanelles. 
The effect was inevitably to unite West Europe 
against her. So it happened that when Russian 
intrigue had involved Britain in the First 
Afghan War in 1839, Britain could not view 
with equanimity the encampment of a Russian 
Army on the Bosporus in order to defend the 
Sultan from the attack, through Syria, of 
Mehemet Ali, the insurgent Khedive of Egypt. 
Therefore Britain and France dealt with Mehe- 
met themselves, by attacking him in Syria in 
1840. 

In 1854 Britain and France were again in- 
volved in action against Russia. France had 
assumed the protectorate of the Christians in 
the Near East, and her prestige in that respect 
was being damaged by Russian intrigue in 
regard to the Holy Places at Jerusalem. So 
France and Britain found themselves involved 
in support of the Turks when the Russian armies 
came against them on the Danube. Lord 
Salisbury, shortly before his death, declared 
that in supporting Turkey we had backed the 



168 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

wrong horse. Is that so certain in regard to 
the middle of last century? Time is of the 
essence of International Policy; there is an 
opportunism which is the tact of politics. 
In regard to things which are not fundamental, 
is it not recognized that in ordinary social inter- 
course it is possible to say the right thing at 
the wrong time? In 1854 it was Russian power, 
and not yet German power, which was the 
center of organization in East Europe, and 
Russia was pressing through the Heartland 
against the Indies, and by the Straits of Con- 
stantinople was seeking to issue from the Heart- 
land into the west, and Prussia was supporting 
Russia. 

In 1876 Turkey was again in trouble and was 
again backed by Britain, though necessarily 
without the support of France. The result was 
to head off Russian power from Constantinople, 
but at the cost of giving to the Germans their 
first step towards the Balkan Corridor by hand- 
ing over to Austrian keeping the Slav Provinces, 
hitherto Turkish, of Bosnia and Herzegovina. 
On that occasion the British Fleet, by Turkish 
sufferance, steamed through the Dardanelles to 
within sight of the minarets of Constantinople. 
The great change in the orientation of Russian 
policy had not yet occurred, and neither Russia 
nor Britain yet foresaw the economic methods 



THE RIVALRY OF EMPIRES 169 

of amassing man-power to which Berlin was 
about to resort. 

When we look back on the course of events 
during the hundred years after the French 
Revolution, and consider East Europe as the 
basis of what was on the whole a single force 
in the world's affairs, do we not realize that 
separate as people of the Victorian Age often 
thought the politics of Europe from those of 
the Not-Europe outside, there was, in fact, no 
such separation. East Europe was in command 
of the Heartland, and was opposed by the sea- 
power of Britain round more than three-quarters 
of the margin of the Heartland, from China 
through India to Constantinople. France and 
Britain were commonly allied in action in regard 
to Constantinople. When, in 1840, there was 
danger of war in Europe because of the quarrel 
between the Khedive and the Sultan, instinc- 
tively all eyes were turned to the Rhine, where 
Prussia had established her outpost provinces. 
Then it was that the German song, the "Wacht 
am Rhein," was written! But the war threat- 
ened against France was not in respect of Alsace 
and Lorraine, but in support of Russia; in other 
words, the quarrel was between East and West 
Europe. 

In 1870 Britain did not support France 
against Prussia. With the after wisdom of 



170 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

events should we not, perhaps, be justified in 
asking whether we did not in this instance fail 
to back the right horse? But the eyes of the 
islanders were still blinded by the victory of 
Trafalgar. They knew what it was to enjoy 
sea-power, the freedom of the ocean, but they 
forgot that sea-power is, in large measure, 
dependent on the productivity of the bases on 
which it rests, and that East Europe and the 
Heartland would make a mighty sea-base. 
In the Bismarckian period, moreover, when the 
center of gravity in East Europe was being 
shifted from Petrograd to Berlin, it was perhaps 
not unnatural that contemporaries should fail 
to realize the subordinate character of the 
quarrels between the three autocracies, and the 
fundamental character of the war between 
Prussia and France. 

The recent Great War arose in Europe from the 
revolt of the Slavs against the Germans. The 
events which led up to it began with the Austrian 
occupation of the Slav provinces of Bosnia and 
Herzegovina in 1878, and the alliance of Russia 
with France in 1895. The Entente of 1904 be- 
tween Britain and France was not an event of the 
same significance; our two countries had cooper- 
ated more often than not in the nineteenth cen- 
tury, but France had been the quicker to perceive 
that Berlin had supplanted Petrograd as the cen- 



THE RIVALRY OF EMPIRES 171 

ter of danger in East Europe, and our two poli- 
cies had, in consequence, been shaped from dif- 
ferent angles for a few years. West Europe, both 
insular and peninsular, must necessarily be op- 
posed to whatever Power attempts to organize 
the resources of East Europe and the Heartland. 
Viewed in the light of that conception, both Brit- 
ish and French policy for a hundred years past 
takes on a large consistency. We were opposed 
to the half-German Russian Czardom because 
Russia was the dominating, threatening force 
both in East Europe and the Heartland for half a 
century. We were opposed to the wholly German 
Kaiserdom, because Germany took the lead in 
East Europe from the Czardom, and would then 
have crushed the revolting Slavs, and dominated 
East Europe and the Heartland. German Kul- 
tur, and all that it means in the way of organiza- 
tion, would have made that German domination 
a chastisement of scorpions as compared with the 
whips of Russia. 



Thus far we have been thinking of the rivalry 
of Empires from the point of view of strategical 
opportunities, and we have come to the conclu- 
sion that the World-Island and the Heartland are 
the final Geographical Realities in regard to sea- 
power and land-power, and that East Europe is 



172 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

essentially a part of the Heartland. But there re- 
mains to be considered the Economic Reality of 
man-power. We have seen that the question of 
base, not only secure but also productive, is vital 
to sea-power; the productive base is needed for 
the support of men not only for the manning of 
ships, but for all the land services in connection 
with shipping, a fact to-day more clearly realized 
in Britain than ever before. In regard to land- 
power we have seen that the camel-men and 
horsemen of past history failed to maintain last- 
ing empires from lack of adequate man-power, 
and that Russia was the first tenant of the Heart- 
land with a really menacing man-power. 

But man-power does not imply a counting only 
of heads, though, other things being equal, num- 
bers are decisive. Nor does it depend merely on 
the number of efficient human beings, though 
health and skill are of the first importance. Man- 
power- — the power of men — is also, and in these 
modern days very greatly, dependent on organ- 
ization, or, in other words, on the "Going Con- 
cern," the social organism. German Kultur, the 
"ways and means" philosophy, has been danger- 
ous to the outer world because it recognizes both 
Realities, Geographical and Economic, and 
thinks only in terms of them. 

The "Political" Economy of Britain and the 
"National" Economy of Germany have come 



THE RIVALRY OF EMPIRES 173 

from the same fountain, the book of Adam Smith. 
Both accept as their bases the division of labor 
and competition to fix the prices at which the 
products of labor shall be exchanged. Both, 
therefore, can claim to be in harmony with the 
dominant tendency of thought in the nineteenth 
century as expressed by Darwin. They differ only 
in the unit of competition. In Political Economy 
that unit is the individual or firm; in National 
Economy it tends to become the State among 
States. This was the fact appreciated by List, 
the founder of German National Economy, under 
whose impulse the Prussian Zollverein or Customs 
Union was broadened until it included most of 
Germany. The British Political Economists wel- 
comed the Zollverein, regarding it as an install- 
ment of their own Free Trade. In truth, by re- 
moving competition in greater or less degree to 
the outside, National Economy aimed at sub- 
stituting for the competition of mere men that of 
great national organizations. In a word, the Na- 
tional Economists thought dynamically, but the 
Political Economists in the main statically. 

This contrast of thing between Kultur and De- 
mocracy was not at first of great practical sig- 
nificance. In the fifties and sixties of last cen- 
tury the Germans were at their wars. The Brit- 
ish Manufacturer was top dog, and, as Bismarck 
once said, Free Trade is the policy of the strong. 



174 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

It was not until 1878, the date of the first scientific 
tariff, that the economic sword of Germany was 
unsheathed. That date marks approximately 
a very great change in the arts of transport to 
which due weight is not always attached. It was 
then that British-built railways in America and 
British steel-built ships on the Atlantic began to 
carry bulk-cargoes. 

What this new fact of the carriage of bulk — 
wheat, coal, iron ore, petroleum — means will be 
realized if we reflect that in Western Canada to- 
day a community of a million people raise the ce- 
real food of twenty millions, and that the other 
nineteen millions are at a distance — in Eastern 
Canada, the Eastern United States, and Europe. 
Prior to 1878 relatively light cargoes of such com- 
modities as cotton, timber, and coal had been 
transported over the ocean by sailing ship, but 
the whole bulk of the cargoes of the world was in- 
significant as measured by the standards of to- 
day. Germany grasped the idea that under the 
new conditions it was possible to grow man-power 
where you would, on imported food and raw 
material, and therefore in Germany itself, for 
strategical use. 

Up to this time the Germans, like the British, 
had freely emigrated, but the German no less than 
the British populations in the new countries made 
an increased demand for British manufactures. 



THE RIVALRY OF EMPIRES 175 

So the British people grew in number at home as 
well as in the Colonies and the United States. 
Cobden and Bright had foreseen this; they meant 
to have cheap food and cheap raw materials 
wherewith to make cheap exports. But the rest 
of the world looked upon our Free Trade as a 
method of Empire rather than of Freedom; the re- 
verse of the medal was presented to them; they 
were to be hewers and drawers for Great Britain. 
The British Islanders unfortunately made the 
mistake of attributing their prosperity mainly to 
their free imports, whereas it was chiefly due to 
their great "Going Concern," and the fact that it 
had been set going before it had competitors. It 
was because they were "the strong" in 1846, that 
they could adopt Free Trade with immediate ad- 
vantage and without serious immediate disad- 
vantage. 

From 1878 Germany began to build up her 
man-power by stimulating employment at home. 
One of her methods was the scientific tariff, a sieve 
through which imports were "screened," so that 
they should contain a minimum of labor and es- 
pecially of skilled labor. But every other means 
was resorted to for the purpose of raising a Going 
Concern which should yield a great production 
at home. The Railways were bought by the 
State, and preferential rates granted. The Banks 
were brought under the control of the State by a 



176 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

system of interlocked shareholding, and credit 
was organized for industry. Cartels and Com- 
bines reduced the cost of production and dis- 
tribution. The result was that about the year 
1900 German emigration, which had been stead- 
ily falling, ceased altogether, except in so far as 
balanced by immigration. 

The economic offensive was increased by meth- 
ods of penetration abroad. Shipping lines were 
subsidized, and banks were used as trade outposts 
in foreign cities. International Combines were 
organized under German control, very largely 
with the help of the Jews of Frankfurt. Finally, 
in 1905, Germany imposed such a system of com- 
mercial treaties on seven adjoining nations as 
meant their economic subjection. One of these 
nations was Russia, then weak from war and rev- 
olution. Those treaties are said to have taken 
ten years to think out — a characteristic efflores- 
cence of Kultur! 

The rapid German growth was a triumph of 
organization, or, in other words, of the strateg- 
ical, the "ways and means" mentality. The 
fundamental scientific ideas were, most of them, 
imported, and the vaunted German Technical 
Education was merely a form of organization. 
The whole system was based on a clear under- 
standing of the Reality of the Going Concern — 
Organized Man-power. 



THE RIVALRY OF EMPIRES 177 

But the Going Concern is a relentless fact, 
for the first political attribute of the animal 
Man is hunger. In the ten years before the 
War Germany was growing at the rate of a 
million souls a year — the difference between 
deaths and births. That meant that the pro- 
ductive Going Concern must not only be main- 
tained, but that its "going" must be constantly 
accelerated. In the course of forty years the 
hunger of Germany for markets had become 
one of the most terrible realities of the world. 
The fact that the commercial treaty with Russia 
would come up for renewal in 1916 was probably 
not unconnected with the forcing of the War; 
Germany required, at all costs, a subject Slav- 
dom to grow food for her and to buy her wares. 

The men who, at Berlin, pulled the lever in 
1914, and set free the dammed-up flood of 
German man-power, have a responsibility which 
has been analyzed and fixed, so far as our in- 
formation yet goes, with keen research by the 
unfortunate generation which has had to fight 
the fearful duel. But before History their 
guilt will be shared by those who, in years past, 
set the Concern Going. In this matter British 
Statesmen and the British People will not be 
held wholly blameless. 

It is the theory of Free Trade that the dif- 
ferent parts of the world should develop on the 



178 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

basis of their natural facilities, and that different 
communities should specialize and render serv- 
ice to one another by exchanging their products 
freely. It was firmly believed that Free Trade 
thus made for peace and the brotherhood of 
men. That may have been a tenable theme in 
the time of Adam Smith and for a generation 
or two afterwards. But under modern con- 
ditions the Going Concern, or, in other words, 
accumulating Financial and Industrial strength, 
is capable of outweighing most natural facili- 
ties. The Going Concern of the Lancashire 
Cotton Industry is an instance of this on a 
great scale. A very small difference of price in 
cheap lines of export will hold or lose a market, 
and the great Going Concern can best afford to 
cut prices. Hence Lancashire has maintained 
her cotton industry for a century against all 
competitors, though the sources of the raw 
material and the principal markets for the 
finished goods are in distant parts of the world. 
Coal and a moist climate are her only natural 
facilities, and they can be paralleled elsewhere. 
The Lancashire cotton industry continues by 
virtue of momentum. 

The result, however, of all specialization is 
to make growth lopsided. When the stress 
began after 1878, British agriculture waned, 
though British industry continued to grow. 



THE RIVALRY OF EMPIRES 179 

But presently lopsidedness developed even 
within British industry; the cotton and ship- 
building branches still grew, but the chemical 
and electrical branches did not increase pro- 
portionately. It was not only that German 
penetration designedly robbed us of our Key 
industries, for the ordinary operation of special- 
ization in a world which was becoming indus- 
trially active outside Britain was bound to 
produce some such contrasts. Britain developed 
vastly those industries into which she gradually 
concentrated her efforts. Therefore she, no 
less than Germany, became "market-hungry," 
for nothing smaller than the whole world was 
market enough for her in her own special lines. 
Britain had no tariff available as a basis for 
bargaining; in that respect she stood naked 
before the world. Therefore, when threatened 
in some vital market, she could but return 
threats of sea-power. Cobden probably foresaw 
this in his later days when he declared the need 
for a strong British Navy, but the rank and 
file of the Manchester School were so persuaded 
that Free Trade made for peace that they gave 
little thought to the special industrial require- 
ments of sea-power; in their view any trade was 
equally good provided it were profitable. Yet 
Britain was fighting for her South American 
markets when her fleet maintained the Monroe 



180 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

doctrine against Germany in the Manila inci- 
dent, and for her Indian market when her fleet 
kept Germany at bay during the South African 
War, and for the open door to her China market 
when her fleet supported Japan in the Russian 
War. Did Lancashire realize that it was by 
force that the free import of cottons was im- 
posed on India? Undoubtedly India has prof- 
ited vastly on a balance by the British Raj, and 
no great weight of guilt need rest on the Lan- 
cashire conscience in this matter; but the fact 
remains that repeatedly, both within and with- 
out the Empire, free-trading, peace-loving 
Lancashire has been supported by the force of 
the Empire. Germany took note of the fact 
and built her fleet, and that fleet in being, and 
still in being to the end of the War, neutralized 
a mighty British effort which would have been 
available otherwise in support of our army in 
France. 

The momentum of the Going Concern is very 
difficult to change in a democracy. The one 
hope of the future is that, as a result of the 
lesson of this War, even democracy may learn 
to take longer views. In an economically lop- 
sided community the majority is on the over- 
developed side, and it is the majority which 
chooses the rulers in a democracy. The vested 
interests as a consequence tend to vest ever 



THE RIVALRY OF EMPIRES 181 

deeper, both the interest of labor in earning and 
buying in particular ways, and of capital in 
making profit in those same ways; on the aver- 
age there is nothing to choose between labor 
and capital in these regards; they both take 
short views. 

But there is the same difficulty of changing 
the Going Concern in an autocracy, although 
that difficulty is felt in a different way. The 
majority in a democracy will not change its 
economic routine, but autocracy often does not 
dare to do so. Germany under the Kaiserdom 
aimed at a World Empire, and to achieve it 
resorted to appropriate economic expedients 
for building up her man-power; presently she 
dared not change her only too successful policy 
even when it was forcing her to war, for the 
alternative was revolution. Like Frankenstein 
she had constructed an unmanageable monster. 

In my belief, both Free Trade of the laissez- 
faire type and Protection of the predatory type 
are policies of Empire, and both make for War. 
The British and the Germans took seats in 
express trains on the same line, but in opposite 
directions. Probably from about 1908 a col- 
lision was inevitable; there comes a moment 
when the brakes have no longer time to act. 
The difference in British and German responsi- 
bility may perhaps be stated thus: the British 



182 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

driver started first, and ran carelessly, neglect- 
ing the signals, whereas the German driver 
deliberately strengthened and armored his train 
to stand the shock, put it on the wrong line, 
and at the last moment opened his throttle 
valves. 

The Going Concern is, in these days, the 
great Economic Reality; it was used criminally 
by the Germans, and blindly by the British. 
The Bolsheviks must have forgotten that it 
existed. 



VI 

THE FREEDOM OF NATIONS 

The Allies have won the War. But how have 
we won? The process is full of warning. We 
were saved, in the first place, by the readiness 
of the British Fleet, and by the decision which 
sent it to sea; so British communications with 
France were secured. That readiness and 
decision were the outcome of the British habit 
of looking to the one thing essential in the 
midst of many things that we leave slipshod; 
it is the way of the capable amateur. We were 
saved, in the second place, by the wonderful 
victory of French genius on the Marne, pre- 
pared for by many years of deep thought in the 
great French Ecole Militaire; in other respects 
the French Army was not as ready as it might 
have been, except in courage. We were saved 
in the third place by the sacrifice — it was no 
less — of the old British professional army at 
Ypres, a name that will stand in history beside 
Thermopylae. We were saved, in short, by 
exceptional genius and exceptional heroism from 
the results of an average refusal to foresee and 

183 



184 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

prepare : eloquent testimony both to the strength 
and the weakness of democracy. 

Then for two years the fighting was stabil- 
ized, and became a war of trenches on land 
and of submarines at sea, a war of attrition in 
which time told in favor of Britain but against 
Russia. In 1917 Russia cracked and then 
broke. Germany had conquered in the East, 
but postponed the utter subjection of the Slavs 
in order first to strike down her Western foes. 
West Europe had to call in the help of America, 
for West Europe alone would not have been 
able to reverse the decision in the East. Again 
time was needed, because America, the third 
of the greater democracies to go to war, was 
even less prepared than the other two. And 
time was bought by the heroism of British 
seamen, the sacrifice of British merchant ship- 
ping, and the endurance of the French and 
British soldiers against an offensive in France 
which all but overwhelmed them. In short, 
we once more pitted character and a right 
insight into essentials against German organi- 
zation, and we just managed to win. At the 
eleventh hour Britain accepted the principle 
of the single strategical command, giving scope 
once more to the Ecole Militaire, 

But this whole record of Western and Oceanic 
fighting, so splendid and yet so humiliating, 



THE FREEDOM OF NATIONS 185 

has very little direct bearing on the Interna- 
tional Resettlement. There was no immediate 
quarrel between East Europe and West Europe; 
the time was past when France would have 
attacked Germany to recover Alsace and Lor- 
raine. The War, let us never forget, began as 
a German effort to subdue the Slavs who were 
in revolt against Berlin. We all know that the 
murder of the Austrian (German) Archduke in 
Slav Bosnia was the pretext, and that the 
Austrian (German) ultimatum to Slav Serbia 
was the method of forcing the War. But it 
cannot be too often repeated that these events 
were the result of a fundamental antagonism 
between the Germans, who wished to be Mas- 
ters in East Europe, and the Slavs, who refused 
to submit to them. Had Germany elected to 
stand on the defensive on her short frontier 
towards France, and had she thrown her main 
strength against Russia, it is not improbable 
that the world would be nominally at peace 
to-day, but overshadowed by a German East 
Europe in command of all the Heartland. The 
British and American insular peoples would 
not have realized the strategical danger until 
too late. 

Unless you would lay up trouble for the 
future, you cannot now accept any outcome of 
the War which does not finally dispose of the 



186 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

issue between German and Slav in East Europe. 
You must have a balance as between German 
and Slav, and true independence of each. You 
cannot afford to leave such a condition of affairs 
in East Europe and the Heartland, as would 
offer scope for ambition in the future, for you 
have escaped too narrowly from the recent 
danger. 

A victorious Roman general, when he entered 
the City, amid all head-turning splendor of a 
"Triumph," had behind him on the chariot a 
slave who whispered into his ear that he was 
mortal. When our Statesmen are in conversa- 
tion with the defeated enemy, some airy cherub 
should whisper to them from time to time this 
saying: 

Who rules East Europe commands the Heart- 
land: 

Who rules the Heartland commands the World- 
Island: 

Who rules the World-Island commands the 
World, 
******* 

Viscount Grey once attributed the whole 
tragic course of recent events to the breach of 
the public law of Europe when Austria tore up 
the Treaty of Berlin by annexing Bosnia and 
Herzegovina in 1908. Undoubtedly that was 



THE FREEDOM OF NATIONS 187 

a milestone in history, but the original occupa- 
tion of these two Slav provinces of Turkey by 
Austria in 1878, under that very Berlin Treaty, 
was perhaps nearer to the source. It meant to 
the Slav mind notice that the Prussian German 
stood behind the Austrian German in his ad- 
vance over the country for which the Slav had 
fought with the Turk, for the War of 1876, it 
must be remembered, which led up to the 
Congress of Berlin, began with a rising of the 
Slavs of Bosnia and Herzegovina against Tur- 
key, and became European because of the 
sympathy of the neighboring Slavs of Serbia 
and Montenegro, which impelled them also to 
fight against the Turk. After 1878 there fol- 
lowed a few years of Russian hesitancy while 
Germany was beginning to build up her man- 
power. Then, in 1895, came the Alliance 
between the Czardom and the French Republic. 
France needed an Ally because of the still open 
Alsatian wound in her side; Russia needed an 
Ally because of the German bully by her side. 
Russia and France were not immediate neigh- 
bors, so that the incompatibility of Democracy 
and Autocracy was not under the circumstances 
an impediment sufficient to forbid the marriage. 
But it was none the less some measure of the 
need in which Russia stood. 

In 1905, when Russia was weak after the 



188 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

Japanese War and her first revolution, Germany 
imposed upon her a punishing Tariff. In 1907 
Russia went so far, in consequence, as to accept 
an understanding even with Britain, her rival 
of two generations and the ally of her late 
enemy, Japan. Again we have evidence of the 
stress that was on her, especially if we remember 
the German influences in her Court and Bureauc- 
racy. 

When, therefore, in 1908, Austria took that 
further action in regard to Bosnia and Herze- 
govina to which Viscount Grey attached such 
importance, she dealt a blow where there were 
already bruises. The little neighbor Serbia 
protested, and the big sister Russia supported 
her, for it meant the definite closing of the door 
to the historic aspirations of Serbian nationality, 
proudly held ever since the great defeat of 
Kossovo in the fourteenth century. But the 
Kaiser of Berlin put on his "shining armor" at 
Vienna, and shook his "mailed fist" in the face 
of the Czar at Petrograd. A few more uncom- 
fortable years, and then, in 1912, came the 
First Balkan War, when the united Balkan 
Slavs overthrew the German-trained Turkish 
Army. In 1913 the Bulgarian Slavs, instead of 
submitting the dispute in regard to the division 
of the territory taken from Turkey to the arbi- 
tration of the Czar, as had been provided by 



THE FREEDOM OF NATIONS 189 

the Treaty of the Balkan Alliance, were per- 
suaded by German intrigue to attack the 
Serbian Slavs. The Second Balkan War ensued, 
in which the Bulgarians were defeated owing 
to the intervention of the Rumanians, and the 
Treaty of Bukharest registered a severe check 
to German ambition, and gave new hope to the 
subject Slavs of Austria. 

The very remarkable report sent from Berlin 
to Paris, three months after the Treaty of Bu- 
kharest, by M. Jules Cambon, the French Ambas- 
sador, makes it clear that Germany had then de- 
cided to obtain by her own sword, whenever an 
opportunity could be made, the position which 
she had failed to win vicariously. Accumulating 
evidence goes to show that within a week of the 
murder of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Ger- 
many had decided to seize that pretext in order 
to force the issue. Austria sought to impose such 
terms of punishment on Serbia for her assumed 
complicity in the murder as no free nation could 
accept, and when Serbia had gone to the utmost 
limit of concession, and even Austria hesitated, 
Germany hastened to fasten her quarrel on Rus- 
sia, the ultimate reserve of all Slavdom. Had 
Russia submitted, as in 1908, she would have 
gone into the question of the renewal of the Tariff 
Treaty with Germany in 1916 with no option but 
a surrender into economic slavery. All this is a 



190 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

familiar story, but it is necessary to keep it 
clearly in mind, if we are to appreciate the fact 
that the key to the resettlement is in the East, 
though the decisive fighting has been in the West. 
How came it that Germany made the double 
mistake of invading France and of invading her 
through Belgium? Germany knew the weakness 
of Russia; there was no illusion of the "steam 
roller" for her. Her choice of the more difficult 
offensive must have been on the assumption that 
the British democracy probably, and the Amer- 
ican democracy certainly, were, from her point 
of view, asleep. She meant the German super- 
man to rule the world, and she thought she saw 
a short cut to her end, in the place of the longer 
path through the Heartland, the command of 
which would fall to her inevitably, could she but 
deprive the Islanders of their "bridge-head" in 
France. But there was another and even 
stronger reason for what she did; she was in the 
grip of economic fate. She was out against the 
Slavs for markets, for raw materials, and for wider 
fields to till ; a million people were being added an- 
nually to her stay-at-home, kept-at-home family. 
But to develop that mighty Going Concern of her 
man-power, so strong for conquest if she could 
keep it going, but so insatiably hungry, she had 
built up Hamburg, and all that Hamburg stood 
for in the way of overseas adventure and home 



THE FREEDOM OF NATIONS 191 

industries. Hamburg had her own momentum, 
and it was not eastward. Thus German strategy 
was biased by political necessity. 

The result was that Berlin committed a fun- 
damental mistake; she fought on two fronts with- 
out fully making up her mind on which front she 
meant to win. You may strike at the two flanks 
of your enemy, the right and the left, but unless 
your force is sufficient to annihilate you must de- 
cide beforehand which stroke is to be the feint 
and which the real attack. Berlin had not de- 
cided between her political objectives — Hamburg 
and overseas dominion or Bagdad and the Heart- 
land — and therefore her strategical aim also was 
uncertain. 



The German blunder, under compelling des- 
tiny, having given us Victory, it is essential that 
we should focus our thought on the stable reset- 
tlement of the affairs of East Europe and the 
Heartland. If we accept anything less than a 
complete solution of the Eastern Question in its 
largest sense we shall merely have gained a res- 
pite, and our descendants will find themselves 
under the necessity of marshalling their power 
afresh for the siege of the Heartland. The essence 
of the resettlement must be territorial, for in East 
Europe, and in still greater measure in the remain- 



192 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

der of the Heartland, we have to deal with re- 
gions whose economic development has only com- 
menced. Unless you look forward, the growth 
of the peoples will by and by unbalance your set- 
tlement. 

No doubt it may be urged that German men- 
tality will be altered by the German defeat. He 
would be a sanguine man, however, who would 
trust the future peace of the world to a change in 
the mentality of any nation. Look back to old 
Froissard or to Shakespeare, and you will find 
your Englishman, Scotsman, Welshman, and 
Frenchman with all their essential characteristics 
already fixed. The Prussian is a definite type 
of humanity with his good and his bad points, 
and we shall be wise if we act on the assumption 
that his kind will breed true to its type. How- 
ever great the defeat which in the end we may 
have inflicted on our chief enemy, we should only 
be cheapening our own achievement if we did not 
recognize in the North German one of the three 
or four most virile races of mankind. 

Even with revolution in Germany let us not be 
too sure in regard to its ultimate effect. The Ger- 
man revolutions of 1848 were almost comic in 
their futility. Since Bismarck there has only 
been one German Chancellor with political in- 
sight, and he — Von Bulow — has declared in his 
book on Imperial [Germany that "the German has 



THE FREEDOM OF NATIONS 193 

always accomplished his greatest works under 
strong, steady, and firm guidance." The end of 
the present disorder may only be a new ruthless 
organization, and ruthless organizers do not stop 
when they have attained the objects which they 
at first set before them. 

It will be replied, of course, that though Prus- 
sian mentality remain unchanged, and though a 
really stable Prussian Democracy be slow in its 
development, yet that Germany will, in any case, 
be so impoverished that she cannot do harm for 
the better part of a century to come. Is there 
not, however, in that idea a misreading of the real 
nature of riches and poverty under modern con- 
ditions? Is it not productive power which now 
counts rather than dead wealth? Shall we not 
all of us — and now in some degree even the Amer- 
icans also — have spent our dead capital, and 
shall we not all of us, the Germans included, be 
starting again in the productive race practically 
from scratch? The world was astonished at the 
rapidity with which France recovered from her 
disaster of 1870, but the power of industrial pro- 
duction was as nothing then to what it is now. 
Sober calculation in regard to Britain leads to the 
conclusion that her increased productive power, 
owing to reorganization and new methods com- 
pelled by the War, should far exceed the interest 
and sinking fund even of her vast War debts. No 



194 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

doubt you have the Paris Resolutions, and can 
deny to a refractory Germany the raw materials 
wherewith to compete with you. If you resort 
to that method, however, you postpone your 
League of Nations, and you remain a League of 
Allies. Are you certain, moreover, that you 
would win in an economic war? You might un- 
doubtedly handicap Germany, but a handicap 
may only lead to greater effort. Did not Na- 
poleon limit the Prussian Army after Jena to 
42,000 men with the colors, and was not the 
Prussian effort to circumvent his prohibition the 
origin of the whole modern system of short- 
service national armies? Economic war, with 
Germany exploiting the Slavs, and presently the 
Heartland, would in the long run merely serve 
to emphasize the distinction between the Con- 
tinent and the Islands, and between land-power 
and sea-power, and no one who contemplates the 
unity of the Great Continent under modern rail- 
way conditions can view unconcernedly either 
the preparation for the World-War which would 
be inevitable, or the ultimate result of that 
War. 

We, the Western nations, have incurred such 
tremendous sacrifices in this conflict that we can- 
not afford to trust to anything that may happen 
at Berlin; we must be secure in any case. In 
other words, we must settle this question between 



THE FREEDOM OF NATIONS 195 

the Germans and Slavs, and we must see to it 
that East Europe, like West Europe, is divided 
into self-contained nations. If we do that, we 
shall not only reduce the German people to its 
proper position in the world, a great enough posi- 
tion for any single people, but we shall also have 
created the conditions precedent to a League of 
Nations. 

You plead that if we inflict a decisive peace 
we shall leave such bitter feelings that no work- 
able League of Nations can ensue. You have 
in mind, of course, the results of the annexation 
of Alsace in 1871. But the lessons of History 
are not to be learned from a single instance. 
The great American Civil War was fought to 
a finish, and to-day the Southerners are as 
loyal to the Union as are the Northerners; the 
two questions of Negro slavery and of the right 
of particular States to secede from the Federa- 
tion were finally decided, and ceased to be the 
causes of quarrel. The Boer War was fought to 
a finish, and to-day General Smuts is an honored 
member of the British Cabinet. The War of 
1866, between Prussia and Austria, was fought 
to a finish, and within a dozen years Austria 
had formed the Dual Alliance with Prussia. 
If you do not now secure the full results of your 
victory and close this issue between the German 
and the Slav, you will leave ill-feeling which 



196 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

will not be based on the fading memory of a 
defeat, but on the daily irritation of millions 
of proud people. 



The condition of stability in the territorial 
rearrangement of East Europe is that the 
division should be into three and not into two 
State-systems. It is a vital necessity that there 
should be a tier of independent States between 
Germany and Russia. 1 The Russians are, and 
for one, if not two, generations must remain, 
hopelessly incapable of resisting German pene- 
tration on any basis but that of a military 
autocracy, unless they be shielded from direct 
attack. The Russian peasantry cannot read; 
they have obtained the only reward they looked 
for when they sided with the revolutionaries 
of the towns, and now as small proprietors they 
hardly know how to manage their own country- 
sides. The middle class have so suffered that 
they were ready to accept order even from the 
hated Germans. As for the workmen of the 

1 The details of the discussion of the territorial resettlement which 
here follow will, of course, become in large measure obsolete with the 
announcement of the decisions of the Peace Congress. My object is not, 
however, so much to debate certain solutions of the problems imme- 
diately confronting us, as to give a concrete aspect to the general idea 
which I am endeavoring to build up. My purpose will still be served 
if it is borne in mind that what I have written on these particulars 
represents the outlook at Christmas 1918. 



THE FREEDOM OF NATIONS 197 

towns, only a small minority of the Russian 
population, but because of their relative edu- 
cation and of their command of the centers of 
communication the rulers to-day of the country, 
Kultur knows well how to "influence" them. 
In the opinion of those who know Russia best, 
autocratic rule of some sort is almost inevitable 
if she is to depend on her own strength to cope 
with the Germans. 

The Slav and kindred nations which inhabit 
the borderland between the Germans and the 
Russians are, however, of a very different 
caliber. Consider the Czechs: have they not 
stood proof against Bolshevism and asserted 
their capacity of nationhood under amazing 
conditions in Russia? Have they not shown 
the most extraordinary political capacity in 
creating anew and maintaining Slav Bohemia, 
though beset on three sides by Germany and 
on the fourth side by Hungary? Have they not 
also made Bohemia a hive of modern industry 
and a seat of modern learning? They, at any 
rate, will not lack the will to order and to inde- 
pendence. 

Between the Baltic and the Mediterranean 
you have these seven non-German peoples, 
each on the scale of a European State of the 
second rank — the Poles, the Bohemians (Czechs 
and Slovaks), the Hungarians (Magyars), the 



petrol** 




;nopt« 



Fig. 31. — The Middle Tier of States between Germany and Russia. 
Many boundary questions have still to be determined. 



THE FREEDOM OF NATIONS 199 

South Slavs (Serbians, Croatians, and Slovenes), 
the Rumanians, the Bulgarians, and the Greeks. 
Of these, two are among our present enemies — 
the Magyars and the Bulgarians. But the 
Magyars and Bulgarians are engirt by the other 
five peoples, and neither of them will be power- 
ful for harm without Prussian support. 

Let us count over these seven peoples. First 
we have the Poles, some 20 million of them, 
with the river Vistula for their arterial water- 
way, and the historic cities of Cracow and 
Warsaw. The Poles are a more generally 
civilized people than the Russians, even in that 
part of Poland which has been tied to Russia; 
in the Prussian province of Posen they have 
enjoyed the advantages of Kultur, without 
some of the debasement which Kultur brought 
to the master German. Undoubtedly there are 
strong currents of party among the Poles, but 
now that the Polish aristocracy of Galicia is 
no longer bribed to the support of the Haps- 
burg throne by leave to oppress the Ruthen- 
ians of East Galicia, at least one motive of 
party, one vested interest, should have disap- 
peared. 

By some means the new Poland must be 
given access to the Baltic Sea, not only because 
that is essential to her economic independence, 
but also because it is desirable to have Polish 



£00 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

ships on the Baltic, which strategically is a 
closed sea of the Heartland, and, further, there 
must be a complete territorial buffer between 
Germany and Russia. Unfortunately the prov- 
ince of East Prussia, mainly German by speech 
and Junker by sentiment, would be detached 
from Germany by any strip of Poland going 
down to the sea. Why should we not contem- 
plate an exchange of peoples as between Prussia 
east of the Vistula, and Polish Posen? l During 
this War we have undertaken much vaster 
things, both in the way of mere transport and 
also of organization. In the past, in order to 
deal with such difficulties, diplomatists have 
resorted to all manner of "servitudes" as the 
land lawyers would say. But rights-of-way 
over other people's property usually become 
inconvenient and lead to disputes. Would it 
not pay Humanity to bear the cost of a radical 
remedy in this case, a remedy made just and 
even generous towards individuals in every 
respect? Each proprietor should be given the 
option of exchanging his property and retaining 
his nationality or of retaining his property and 

1 Since I wrote this paragraph, M. Venizelos, in an interview with a 
Times correspondent, dated Paris, January 14, 1919, has used these 
words: "This would still leave some hundreds of thousands of Greeks 
under Turkish rule in the centre of Asia Minor. For this there is only 
one cure, and that is to encourage a wholesale and mutual transfer of 
population.'* 



THE FREEDOM OF NATIONS 201 

changing his nationality. But if he selects the 
latter alternative there must be no reservation 
of special rights in respect of schools and other 
social privileges. The United States in her 
schools sternly imposes the English language 
on all her immigrants. Because the conquerors 
of old time did their work ruthlessly, countries 
like France and England are to-day homogene- 
ous and free from that mixture of races which 
has made the Near East a plague to humanity. 
Why should we not use our modern powers of 
transport and organization to achieve the same 
happy condition of affairs — justly and gener- 
ously? The reasons for doing so in this par- 
ticular instance are far reaching; a Polish Posen 
would bite a very threatening bay into the East- 
ern frontier of Germany, and a German East 
Prussia would be a stepping-stone for German 
penetration into Russia. 1 

Next among our "Border" peoples are the 
Czechs and Slovaks, until recently severed by 
the line dividing Austria from Hungary, as the 
Poles were severed by the frontiers between 
Russia, Prussia, and Austria. The Czechs and 
Slovaks together number perhaps nine millions; 
they will make one of the most virile little 
peoples in Europe, and they are equipped with 

1 To meet the obvious argumentum ad hominem, let me say that I see 
no really comparable strategical necessities in the case of Ireland! 



202 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

a remarkable country, offering coal, metals, 
timber, water-power, corn, and wine, and 
centered on the main line of railway from 
the Baltic and Warsaw to Vienna and the 
Adriatic. 

Then we come to the South Slavs — Jugo 
means South — in their three tribes of Slovenes, 
Croatians, and Serbs. They number about 
twelve millions. They also have been sundered 
by the line between Austria and Hungary; 
moreover, they are of the rival Latin and Greek 
Churches. For any one who knows the Balkans, 
it is eloquent testimony indeed to the effect of 
Austro-Hungarian tyranny that the Roman 
Catholic Slovenes and Croatians should have 
made the pact of Corfu with the Greek Ortho- 
dox Serbs. The South Slavs will have access 
to Dalmatian ports on the Adriatic, and one of 
the trunk railways of the world will run down 
the Save Valley to Belgrade, and then through 
the Morava and Maritza "Corridor" to Con- 
stantinople. 

Rumania is the next State of this middle 
east of Europe. The natural focus of Rumania 
is the great Transylvanian bastion of the Car- 
pathians, with fruitful valleys, metalliferous 
mountains, oil wells, and splendid forests. The 
Transylvanian peasantry is Rumanian, but a 
"privileged" minority of Magyars and "Sax- 



THE FREEDOM OF NATIONS 203 

ons" have been the rulers. Here again it should 
be no quite impossible feat of statesmanship 
to arrange for an equitable exchange of homes, 
or a full acceptance of Rumanian Nationality, 
though it must be admitted that the hostility 
between Saxon and Ruman is not so acute as 
that between Prussian and Pole. 

The rest of Rumania, the present kingdom, is 
the glacis, eastward and southward, of Tran- 
sylvania, watered by the Transylvanian rivers. 
This fertile glacis is one of the chief sources in 
Europe of oil, wheat, and maize; the twelve mil- 
lion Rumanians will be a rich people. At Gal- 
atz, Braila, and Constanza they have ports on 
the Black Sea, and it will be a prime interest of 
all free peoples that there should be Rumanian 
ships on that sea, for it is naturally a closed water 
of the Heartland. The time will never come 
when the League of Nations will be able to re- 
gard the Baltic and Black Seas without concern, 
for the Heartland offers the basis of an all-pow- 
erful militarism. Civilization consists in the con- 
trol of nature and of ourselves, and the League 
of Nations, as the supreme organ of united hu- 
manity, must closely watch the Heartland and 
its possible organizers, for the same reason that 
the control of the police in London and Paris is 
regarded as a national and not merely a munic- 
ipal concern. 



204 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

The Greeks were the first of our seven peoples 
of the Middle Tier to achieve their emancipation 
from German control in this War for the simple 
reason that they are outside the Heartland and 
therefore accessible to sea-power. But in these 
days of submarines and aeroplanes, the posses- 
sion of Greece by a great Heartland power would 
probably carry with it the control of the World- 
Island; the Macedonian history would be reen- 
acted. Now as to the Magyars and Bulgarians. 
The truth is that both of them were exploited by, 
although not subject to, the Prussians. Every 
one who knows Budapest is aware of the deeply 
alien feeling of the Magyars toward the Germans; 
the recent alliance was strictly one of convenience 
and not of hearts. The ruling Magyar caste of 
about a million people has been oppressive of the 
other nine millions of its own race no less than of 
the subject races. The alliance with Prussia — 
for it has in reality been an alliance with Prussia 
rather than with Austria — has been strictly in 
return for support of the Magyar oligarchy. No 
doubt the Magyars have begotten deep feelings 
of hostility among the Slavs and Rumanians, but 
if there be no more profit to be made from farm- 
ing Slavs in the German behalf, a democratic 
Hungary will sooner or later adapt herself to the 
new environment. The Bulgarians fought, let 
us remember, as allies of the Serbs against the 



THE FREEDOM OF NATIONS 205 

Turks, and the difference between Serb and Bul- 
gar, though bitter for the time being, is a family 
difference. It is a difference of recent growth, 
and based largely on rival ecclesiastical organi- 
zations of recent foundation. The Bulgarians 
must not be allowed to exploit their treachery in 
the Second Balkan War, but if an equitable set- 
tlement be dictated by the Allies, both nations, 
the Bulgarians and the Serbs, deeply war-weary, 
will probably accept it joyfully. For twenty 
years only one will, that of the German Czar Fer- 
dinand, has counted in Bulgaria. 

The most important point of strategical sig- 
nificance in regard to these Middle States of East 
Europe is that the most civilized of them, Poland 
and Bohemia, lie in the North, in the position 
most exposed to Prussian aggression. Securely 
independent the Polish and Bohemian nations 
cannot be unless as the apex of a broad wedge of 
independence, extending from the Adriatic and 
Black Seas to the Baltic; but seven independent 
States, with a total of more than sixty million 
people, traversed by railways linking them se- 
curely with one another, and having access 
through the Adriatic, Black, and Baltic Seas with 
the Ocean, will together effectively balance the 
Germans of Prussia and Austria, and nothing less 
will suffice for that purpose. None the less the 
League of Nations should have the right under 



206 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

International Law of sending War fleets into the 
Black and Baltic Seas. 



This great deed of International Statesman- 
ship accomplished, and there would appear to be 
no impossibility of realizing the democratic ideal, 
the League of Nations, whose mirage has haunted 
our Western peoples from afar over the des- 
ert of War. What are the essential conditions 
which must be fulfilled if you are to have a real 
and potent League of Nations? Viscount Grey, 
in his recent pamphlet, laid down two such con- 
ditions. The first was that "the Idea must be 
adopted with earnestness and conviction by the 
Executive Heads of States." The second was 
that "the Governments and Peoples of the States 
willing to found it understand clearly that it will 
impose some limitation upon the national action 
of each, and may entail some inconvenient obli- 
gation. The stronger nations must forego the 
right to make their interests prevail against the 
weaker by force." 

These are excellent and very necessary theses, 
but do they carry us far enough? Before you 
undertake any general obligation, is it not well 
to consider what it is likely to mean in concrete 
terms? Your League will have to reckon with 
certain realities. There was before the War an 



THE FREEDOM OF NATIONS 207 

incipient League of Nations; its members were 
the States party to the system of International 
Law. Have we not had to fight the War just be- 
cause two of the greater States broke the Inter- 
national Law, first in regard to one and then an- 
other of the smaller States, and have not those 
two greater States very nearly succeeded in de- 
feating a very powerful League of Nations which 
intervened in behalf of the Law? In the face of 
such a fact, is it quite adequate to say that 
stronger nations must "forego" the right to make 
their interests prevail by force against the 
weaker? In a word, do not our ideals involve us 
in a circle unless we reckon with realities? 

Is it not plain that if your League is to last 
there must be no nation strong enough to have 
any chance against the general will of Humanity? 
Or, to put the matter in another way ; there must 
be no predominant partner or even group of part- 
ners in your League. Is there any case of a suc- 
cessful federation with a predominant partner? 
In the United States you have the great States 
of New York, Pennsylvania, and Illinois, but no 
one of them counts for more than a small frac- 
tion of the whole Union. In Canada you have 
Quebec and Ontario balancing one another, so 
that the smaller provinces of the Dominion are 
never likely to be bullied by either. In the Com- 
monwealth of Australia you have the approxi- 



208 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

mately equal States of New South Wales and Vic- 
toria. In Switzerland not even the large Canton 
of Berne is anything like predominant. Has not 
German Federation been a pretense because of 
the dominance of Prussia? Is not the chief dif- 
ficulty in the way of devolution within the Brit- 
ish Isles, even if Irishmen would agree among 
themselves, the predominance of England? Did 
not this War originate from the fact that you 
allowed an almost dominant Germany to arise in 
Europe? Have not the great Wars of the past in 
Europe come from the fact that one State in the 
European System, under Napoleon, Louis XIV., 
or Philip II., had become too powerful? Is it 
not necessary, if your League of Nations is to 
have any chance of success, to face this cumula- 
tive evidence and not to gloss it over? 

Is there not also another Reality with which 
you must reckon; the Reality of the Going 
Concern? If the nations of your League are 
to settle down to a quiet life, there are two 
different ways, it seems to me, in which you 
will have to face the Reality of the Going Con- 
cern; in respect of the Present and of the Future. 
What is meant by this Reality in the Present 
will best be conveyed by concrete consideration 
of the States available as the units to be leagued 
together. 

The British Empire is a Going Concern. You 



THE FREEDOM OF NATIONS 209 

will not persuade a majority of Britons to risk 
the coherence of the Empire, which has so 
triumphantly stood the test of this War, for 
any paper scheme of a Universal League. It 
follows, therefore, that the governing units of 
the British Empire can only grow by gradual 
process into their place as units of your League. 
Yet the relations of six of them are already, in 
fact, the relations of equality and, under their 
British League, of independency. Only last 
year was the last word said in that matter. The 
Prime Ministers of the Dominions are hence- 
forth to communicate directly with the Prime 
Minister of the United Kingdom, and no longer 
through the subordinate Colonial Secretary; 
the Parliament at Westminster is no longer to 
be called the Imperial Parliament but only the 
Parliament of the United Kingdom. It only 
remains that the King should no longer be 
called King of the United Kingdom and of the 
Dominions beyond the Seas, but that the 
equality of all the Dominions should be recog- 
nized by some such title as King of all the 
Britains. Even in respect of realities — though 
in such matters names become realities — have 
we not now the certainty that the United King- 
dom, Canada, and Australia will each have its 
own fleet and army, to be put under a single 
strategical command only on the outbreak of 



210 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

War? As regards population, too, is it not now 
a question of only a few years before Canada 
and Australia will equal the Motherland in 
power? We shall then have the three minor 
Dominions — New Zealand, South Africa, and 
Newfoundland — counting the more because of 
the balance between the three major Domin- 
ions. 

France and Italy are Going Concerns. Are 
they going to enter a League in which the 
British Empire is a unit? Fortunately we have 
achieved the single strategical command in the 
later stages of the War, so that the name Ver- 
sailles has now an added historic meaning. 
No longer merely through their Ambassadors, 
but in the persons of their Prime Ministers, the 
United Kingdom, France, and Italy have ac- 
quired the habit of taking counsel together. 
These three countries of West Europe are not 
unfitted by any decisive inequality of size to be 
fellow members of a League. Is it not probable 
that occasions will occur when the Prime Min- 
isters of Canada and Australia may be called 
into conference with the Prime Ministers of the 
United Kingdom, France, and Italy? They 
will be occasions of all the more value if you 
recognize the Going Concerns of to-day and do 
not attempt to make merely paper progress. 
Remember that it required the peril of the 



THE FREEDOM OF NATIONS 211 

German offensive of 1918 to secure the unity 
of strategical command. 1 

Then what of the United States? There is 
no good in pretending that the separate Ameri- 
can States can be units in your League; the 
Republic fought the greatest War in History, 
before this War, in order to weld them together. 
Yet the United States form something very 
like a predominant partner as against the 
separate allied countries of West Europe. The 
United States must be in your League; and 
that means that, for healthy working, the six 
Britains must be held together as a counter- 
balance. Fortunately 3000 miles of undefended 
frontier in North America constitute a fact of 
good omen, though, to be quite frank, it would 
signify more if the countries which that frontier 
has separated had been less unequal; the test 
would have been more severe. 

But the need of a reasonable equality of 
power as between a considerable number of 
the members of the League, so that in future 
crises — and they will occur — it may not be 
exposed to danger from predominance in any 
quarter, is less urgent in respect of the insular 
than of the continental members. There are 
the obvious limitations of sea-power; there are 

1 Since this was written the Paris Conference has treated the British 
Empire as a hybrid — a unit for some purposes. 



212 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

also natural boundaries which define the spread 
of any one insular, or even peninsular, base of 
power. The test of the League will be in the 
Heartland of the Continent. Nature there 
offers all the prerequisites of ultimate dominance 
in the world; it must be for man by his fore- 
sight and by the taking of solid guarantees to 
prevent its attainment. Notwithstanding their 
revolutions the German and Russian peoples 
are Going Concerns, each with a powerful 
historical momentum. 

Therefore let the idealists who, now that the 
nations are locked into a single world system, 
rightly see in the League of Nations the only 
alternative to Hell on Earth, concentrate their 
attention on the adequate subdivision of East 
Europe. With a Middle Tier of really inde- 
pendent States between Germany and Russia 
they will achieve their end, and without it they 
will not. Any mere trench-line between the 
German Powers and Russia, such as was con- 
templated by Naumann in his Central Europe, 
would have left German and Slav still in dual 
rivalry, and no lasting stability could have 
ensued. But the "Middle Tier," supported 
by the outer nations of the World League, will 
accomplish the end of breaking-up East Europe 
into more than two State-systems. Moreover, 
the States of that Tier, of approximate equality 



THE FREEDOM OF NATIONS 213 

of power, will themselves be a very acceptable 
group for the recruitment of the League. 

Once thus remove the temptation and open- 
ing to World-Empire, and who can say what 
will occur among the German and Russian 
peoples themselves? There are already indi- 
cations that Prussia, which, unlike England or 
France, is a purely artificial structure, will be 
broken into several Federal States. In one 
region the Prussians belong by history to East 
Europe and in another to West Europe. Is it 
not probable that the Russians will fall into a 
number of States in some sort of loose federa- 
tion? Germany and Russia have grown into 
great Empires out of opposition to one another; 
but the peoples of the Middle Tier — Poles, 
Bohemians, Hungarians, Rumanians, Serbs, 
Bulgarians, and Greeks — are much too unlike 
to federate for any purpose except defense, 
yet they are all so different both from Ger- 
mans and Russians that they may be trusted 
to resist any new organization of either great 
neighbor making towards the Empire of East 
Europe. 

There are certain strategical positions in the 
Heartland and Arabia which must be treated 
as of world importance, for their possession 
may facilitate or prevent a world domination. 
It does not, however, follow that it would be 



214 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

wise to commit them forthwith to an untried 
international administration; here, too, it is 
very necessary to bear in mind the truth of the 
Going Concern. Condominium has not, as a 
rule, been a success, for the reason that the 
agents of the joint protecting Powers almost 
inevitably take sides with the local nationalities 
or parties. The most effective method of inter- 
national control would seem to be that of com- 
missioning some one Power as trustee for hu- 
manity — a different Power, of course, in the 
case of different positions. That was the 
method experimentally tried when Austria- 
Hungary was entrusted with the administration 
of Bosnia and Herzegovina at the Congress of 
Berlin, and it succeeded so far as the material 
advancement of the protected provinces was 
concerned. There is no reason why the new 
principle and the facts of the Going Concern 
should not be reconciled in the cases of Panama, 
Gibraltar, Malta, Suez, Aden, and Singapore, 
by regarding the American Republic and the 
British Empire as World Trustees for the peace 
of the Ocean and of the straits connecting the 
basins of the Ocean. This, however, would 
amount merely to a regularization of existing 
facts. The test of the principle, as of most 
other World principles, is in connection with 
the Heartland and Arabia. The Islanders of 



THE FREEDOM OF NATIONS 215 

the world cannot be indifferent to the fate 
either of Copenhagen or of Constantinople, or 
yet of the Kiel Canal, for a great Power in the 
Heartland and East Europe could prepare, 
within the Baltic and Black Seas, for War on 
the Ocean. During the present War it has 
taken the whole naval strength of the Allies to 
hold the North Sea and the Eastern Mediter- 
ranean. An adequate submarine campaign, 
based on the Black Sea from the beginning of 
the War, would probably have given security 
to an army operating overland against the 
Suez Canal. It follows, therefore, that Palestine, 
Syria, and Mesopotamia, the Bosporus and 
the Dardanelles, and the outlets from the 
Baltic must be internationalized in some man- 
ner. In the case of Palestine, Syria, and Meso- 
potamia, it has been understood that Britain 
and France would undertake international 
trusts. Why should we not solve the problem 
of Constantinople by making that historic 
city the Washington of the League of Nations? 
When the network of railways has covered the 
World-Island, Constantinople will be one of 
the most accessible places on the globe by 
Railway, Steamer, and Aeroplane. From Con- 
stantinople the leading nations of the West 
might radiate light through precisely those 
regions, oppressed during many past centuries, 



216 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

in which light is most to be desired from the 
point of view of humanity at large; from Con- 
stantinople we might weld together the West 
and the East, and permanently penetrate the 
Heartland with oceanic freedom. 

The Jewish National seat in Palestine will be 
one of the most important outcomes of the War. 
That is a subject on which we can now afford to 
speak the truth. The Jew, for many centuries 
shut up in the Ghetto, and shut out of most hon- 
orable positions in Society, developed in an un- 
balanced manner and became hateful to the av- 
erage Christian by reason of his excellent, no less 
than his deficient, qualities. German penetra- 
tion has been conducted in the great commercial 
centers of the world in no small measure by Jew- 
ish agency, just as German domination in South- 
eastern Europe was achieved through Magyar 
and Turk, with Jewish assistance. Jews are 
among the chief of the Bolsheviks of Russia. 
The homeless, brainful Jew lent himself to such 
internationalist work, and Christendom has no 
great right to be surprised by the fact. But you 
will have no room for these activities in your 
League of independent, friendly nations. There- 
fore a National Home, at the physical and histor- 
ical center of the world, should make the Jew 
"range" himself. Standards of judgment, 
brought to bear on Jews by Jews, should result, 



THE FREEDOM OF NATIONS 217 

even among those large Jewish communities 
which will remain as Going Concerns outside 
Palestine. This, however, will imply the frank 
acceptance of the position of a Nationality, which 
some Jews seek to forget. There are those who 
try to distinguish between the Jewish religion and 
the Hebrew race, but surely the popular view of 
their broad identity is not far wrong. 

In the vast and populous regions of Asia and 
Africa which lie beyond the girdle of the great 
deserts and plateaux there are Going Concerns, 
such as the British Raj in India, which it would 
be folly indeed to shake down in your hurry to 
realize a world-symmetry for your League of 
Nations. But it is essential that neither Kiau- 
chau nor East Africa should go back to the 
Power which took them with a keen strategical 
eye to the day when armies marching over- 
land should find in each of them a citadel al- 
ready prepared; which took them, moreover, 
with the clear intention that the Chinese and the 
Negroes should be utilized as subsidiary man- 
power to help in the conquest of the World- 
Island. What part may ultimately be played by 
that half of the Human Race which lives in "The 
Indies " no man can yet foresee, but it is the plain 
duty of the Insular peoples to protect the Indians 
and Chinese from Heartland conquest. 

German Southwest Africa and the German 



218 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

Australasian Colonies must not be returned; the 
principle of independence within the League im- 
plies that, subject to an International Trust in 
the case of a few critically important positions, 
each Nation must be mistress in her own house, 
and that principle holds in regard to South Africa 
and Australia. Any other principle would leave 
the seeds of future quarrels and would impede 
disarmament. 



So much in respect of the starting of the 
League and of the Going Concern in the Present. 
It remains for us to speak of the Going Concern 
in the Future. Viscount Grey has described the 
state of mind which will be required when we ap- 
proach this great International enterprise: is 
there not something more precise to be said in j 
that matter also? 

I have expressed my belief that both Free 
Trade of the Laissez-faire type and Predatory 
Protection of the German type are principles of 
Empire, and that both make for War. Fortu- 
nately the younger Britains refused to accept the 
Free Trade of Manchester; they used the fiscal 
independence granted to them by the Mother- 
land to pursue that economic ideal which was 
foreshadowed by the great American statesman, 
Alexander Hamilton — the ideal of the truly in- 



THE FREEDOM OF NATIONS 219 

dependent nation, balanced in all its develop- 
ment. This does not in the least imply that a 
great international trade should not be done, but 
it should be a trade so controlled that the effect 
of it is always tending towards the balance aimed 
at, and is not accumulating, beyond hope of re- 
covery, economic one-sidedness. 

No stable League of Nations appears to me 
possible if any nation is allowed to practice com- 
mercial "penetration," for the object of that pen- 
etration is to deprive other nations of their fair 
share of the more skilled forms of employment, 
and it is inevitable that a general soreness should 
ensue in so far as it succeeds. Nor, to speak 
quite plainly, is there any great difference in re- 
sult if some nations feel that they are reduced to 
the position of hewers and drawers owing to the 
industrial specialization of another country un- 
der the regime of unrestricted Cobdenism; wher- 
ever an industry is so developed in one country 
that it can be content with no less than a 
world-market for its particular products, the 
economic balance of other countries tends to be 
upset. No important country, after this War, 
is going to allow itself to be deprived either of 
any "key" or of any "essential" industry. 1 By 

1 The distinction between these two terms is not always observed. 
Key industries are those which, although themselves relatively small, 
are necessary to other and much greater industries. Thus, for instance, 



220 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

the time you have exhausted these two categories, 
you will find that you might just as well have 
adopted the attractive positive ideal of general 
economic independence instead of being driven 
from one expedient to another in mere defensive- 
ness. If you attempt to maintain a negative 
Cobdenism with exceptions, you will, under the 
conditions of the world that are opening before 
us, very soon build up a large and clumsy body 
of merely ad hoc machineries. A general system 
of low duties and bounties would enable you to 
deal quickly and lightly with each difficulty as 
it develops, because you would have the appro- 
priate machinery of control at your hand. But 
I am not here going into the detail of these ques- 
tions of machinery; I am dealing with the ques- 
tion of ideal and aim. The Cobdenite believes 
that international trade is good in itself, and that 
specialization as between country and country, 
provided that it arises blindly under the guid- 
ance of natural causes, should not be thwarted. 
The Berliner, on the other hand, has also en- 
couraged economic specialization among the na- 

aniline dye-stuffs to the value of two million pounds a year were utilized 
in Great Britain before the War in textile and paper manufactures of 
the annual worth of 200 millions. The proportion was something like 
that of a key to the door which it unlocks. Essential industries there 
are which have not this character of a small key; such, for instance, in 
this twentieth century is the steel industry. It is well to preserve the 
distinction, because different defensive measures may perhaps be needed 
in the two cases. 



THE FREEDOM OF NATIONS 221 

tions, but he operates scientifically, accumulat- 
ing in his own country those industries which 
give most, and most highly-skilled, employment. 
The result is the same in each case; a Going Con- 
cern of Industry grips the nation and deprives 
it, as well as other nations, of true independence. 
The resulting differences accumulate to the point 
of quarrel and collision. 

There are three attitudes of mind in regard to 
the Going Concern which spell tragedy. There 
is Laissez-faire, which is surrender and fatalism. 
This attitude produces a condition comparable 
with that of a disease brought on by self -neglect; 
the human body is a going concern which, be- 
coming unbalanced in its functions, is organically 
affected, so that in the end no doctor 's advice or 
even surgeon's scalpel can avail, since to stop the 
disease means the stoppage of life itself. No 
doubt it seemed, in the warm sunshine of Britain 
in the middle of the last century, that the wiser 
political philosophy was to live for the day and to 
trust in Providence. Fortunately disease had 
not progressed to a fatal stage when we came to 
the surgeon's table in August, 1914. But a mil- 
lion men of military age classified as unfit for 
military service constitute a symptom which al- 
most makes one thank God that the War came 
when it did. 

The second attitude of mind in relation to 



222 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

the Going Concern is that of Panic. This has 
been the attitude of Prussia, though it was 
hidden by the flattering philosophy of the 
Superman, not less pleasant, while it was credi- 
ble, than the comforting religion of Laissez- 
faire, Nakedly stated, however, Kultur meant 
that, being obsessed with the idea of compe- 
tition and natural selection, as finally expressed 
in Darwinism, and being frightened, the Prus- 
sians decided that if, in the end, men must 
come to man-eating in order to survive, they, 
at any rate, would be the cannibals! So they 
assiduously cultivated the strength and effi- 
ciency of the prize-fighter. But the monster 
Going Concern into which they developed their 
country grew hungrier and hungrier, and at 
last they had to let it feed. Half the cruel and 
selfish things which are done in this world are 
done for reasons of Panic. 

The third attitude is that of the Anarchist 
and the Bolshevik — they would distinguish no 
doubt between themselves, but whether you 
break the Going Concern or take it to pieces 
makes little practical difference. This attitude 
means social suicide. It is vital that discipline 
should be maintained in the Western Democ- 
racies during the period of Reconstruction, 
whatever Bolshevism may happen in Central 
as well as East Europe. The Westerners are 



THE FREEDOM OF NATIONS 223 

the Victors, and they alone are able to prevent 
the whole world from having to pass through 
the cycle so often repeated in the case of indi- 
vidual nations — Idealism, Disorder, Famine, 
Tyranny. Provided that we do not hasten to 
dismantle running social machinery, but ac- 
complish our ideals by successive acts of social 
discipline, we shall maintain the steady output 
of production, the fundamental Reality, that 
is to say, on which now, more than ever before, 
Civilization rests. The disorder of a whole 
world, let us not forget, implies the absence of 
any remaining National base as a fulcrum for 
the restoration of order, and therefore the in- 
definite prolongation of Anarchy and Tyranny. 
It took several centuries to attain again to the 
stage of civilization which had been reached 
when the Roman World of Antiquity broke 
down. 

But if drifting in the grip of the Going Con- 
cern leads to disease in a nation, and if we must 
not fall into panic because that results in crime, 
nor yet suffer revolt because that ends in sui- 
cide, what course remains open to us? Surely 
that of control, which in a democracy means 
self-control. If this War has proved anything, 
it has proved that these gigantic forces of 
modern production are capable of control. 
Beforehand it was assumed by many that a 



224 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

World-War would bring so general a financial 
crash that it would not — could not — be allowed 
to take place. Yet how easily, when it actually 
befell, were the British and German systems 
of credit disengaged by the simple device of 
using the national credits to carry the roots of 
individual credit which were pulled out of the 
enemy soil. 

If you once admit control of the Going Con- 
cern to be your aim, then the ideal State-unit 
of your League must be the nation of balanced 
economic development. Raw materials are 
unequally distributed over the world, but the 
primary pursuits of men, other than the grow- 
ing of the staples of food proper to each region, 
form in these days but a relatively small part 
of the total of Industry. Minerals must be 
won in the mines and tropical produce can only 
be grown within the tropics, but both minerals 
and tropical produce are now easy of transport, 
and the higher industries may, therefore, be 
located at the choice and will of mankind. We 
are what our occupations make us; every ma- 
ture man is imprinted with the characteristics 
of his calling. So is it with the nations, and no 
self-respecting nation henceforth will allow itself 
to be deprived of its share of the higher indus- 
tries. But these industries are so interlocked 
that they cannot be developed except in balance 



THE FREEDOM OF NATIONS 225 

one with another. It follows, therefore, that 
each nation will strive for development in each 
great line of industrial activity, and should be 
allowed to attain to it. 

This is the ideal, I am firmly persuaded, 
which will make for peace. In ordinary society 
it is notoriously difficult for people of very 
unequal fortune to be friends in the true sense; 
that beautiful relationship is not compatible 
with patronage and dependence. Civilization, 
no doubt, consists in the exchange of services, 
but it should be an equal exchange. Our eco- 
nomics of money have assessed as equal services 
of very unequal value from the point of view 
of the quality of the industrial employment 
which they give. For the contentment of 
nations we must contrive to secure some equal- 
ity of opportunity for national development. 



VII 

THE FREEDOM OF MEN 

From the consideration of the Realities pre- 
sented by the geography of our globe we have 
come to the conclusion that if the Freedom of 
Nations is to be secure, it must rest on a reason- 
able approach to equality of resources as be- 
tween a certain number of the larger Nations. 
We have also seen that, given the imperious 
Reality of the Going Concern, it is necessary 
that the Nations should be so controlled in their 
economic growth that they do not tend to get 
out of hand and clash. But what have these 
principles to do with the Freedom of Men and 
Women? Will free Nations in a League be able 
to give more freedom to their citizens? Cer- 
tainly the men who have been fighting, the men 
who have been sailing our ships through danger 
on the seas, and the mothers and wives who 
have been working, waiting, and mourning at 
home, are not looking for the mere defeat of a 
danger that threatened; they have positive 
visions of greater happiness in their own lives 
or in the lives of those dear to them. 

Let us analyze from this point of view the 



THE FREEDOM OF MEN 227 

successive stages of democratic idealism which 
were referred to in the opening pages of this 
book. The American Declaration of Inde- 
pendence claimed for all men the right to pursue 
happiness. The French Revolution crystal- 
lized this phrase into the single word Liberty, 
and added Equality, which implies control, and 
Fraternity, which implies self-control. Fra- 
ternity is of the essence of successful democracy, 
the highest but the most difficult of all modes 
of government, since it demands most of the 
average citizen. That is the first cycle of demo- 
cratic thought; it pertains directly and obviously 
to the Freedom of Men. 

In the middle of the nineteenth century 
began the second cycle, which has aimed at the 
Freedom of Nations. The claim of Nationality 
is to the right of a local group of men to pursue 
happiness together, with their own ways of 
control to secure equality among them. Fra- 
ternal feeling is not easy of attainment unless 
you have been brought up together; hence the 
part played by History in the National senti- 
ment. But mere Nationalism claims only the 
right to pursue happiness together; it is not 
until we come to the League of Nations that 
we advance to an ideal which has been thought 
out to a stage equivalent to that of the great 
trilogy of the French Revolution. Some degree 



228 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

of control by the League is admittedly necessary 
to secure the equality of nations before the law, 
and I believe that in the ideal of the balanced 
development of each nation we have the self- 
control which is implied in fraternity. With- 
out balanced development nations are sure to 
acquire special hungers, whether neglectfully 
or criminally, which can only be satisfied at the 
expense of other nations. In other words, we 
can only permanently secure equality among 
the nations by control from within as well as 
from without. But this involves the statement 
that home politics must be conducted with an 
eye to their effect on foreign politics, a truism 
in the superficial sense, but carrying deeper 
implications than are commonly admitted. 

It carries, I believe, this implication among 
others, that, since nations are local societies, 
their organization must, if they are to last, be 
based dominantly on local communities within 
them, and not on nation-wide "interests." 
That is the old English idea of the House of 
Commons. The word commons is, of course, 
identical with the French word "communes," 
signifying communities; the House of Com- 
munities — shires and burghs — would be the true 
modern translation. As a fact, the knights and 
the burgesses of the Middle Ages represented 
communities of far more complete and balanced 



THE FREEDOM OF MEN 229 

life than the artificially equalized constituencies 
of to-day. 

If the real organization of the Nation be by 
classes and interests — and that is the alter- 
native to organization by localities 1 — it is quite 
inevitable that the corresponding classes in 
neighboring nations will get themselves to- 
gether, and that what has been described as 
the horizontal cleavage of international society 
will ensue. Fortunately the Tower of Babel 
was the beginning of certain great Going Con- 
cerns known as Languages, and these have 
impeded internationalism. But the develop- 
ment of the modern struggle between capital 
and labor has led to the use of some inter- 
national phrases and words which have carried 
a few key ideas into common currency; they 
correspond unfortunately to certain social Re- 
alities which were rapidly gathering importance 
when this War came upon us. International 
Combines of Capital were obtaining such power 
as to overawe some of the smaller States of the 
world, and they were being used by Germany 
for purposes of penetration, or, in other words, 
to wreck the economic and social balance of 
rival nations. Labor could only follow suit, 

1 As has been pointed out by Mr. H. G. Wells, though he would — 
wrongly as I think — yield to current tendencies and accept organization 
by " interests." 



230 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

and also try to organize internationally. So 
came the idea of class warfare between the 
international proletariat and international capi- 
talism. During the progress of the War we 
have gone to great trouble to break up the 
international organization of Capital. Is Labor 
now to reverse all that has been achieved in 
this respect by persisting with an international 
organization which sprang into existence for 
the very right purpose of righting International 
Capital? No less than such a reversal is in- 
volved if the momentum of internationally 
organized labor becomes powerful, for a resusci- 
tation of International Capitalism would then 
be inevitable. The economic war that would 
ensue could only end either in general Bolshe- 
vism or in the victory of one of the parties, and 
that party would then become the real Govern- 
ment of the World, a new Empire of organizers. 
If labor were to win, it would soon be found 
that Labor organizers would not differ from 
their Military and Capitalist predecessors in 
the essential respect that they would cling to 
power and continue blindly to organize until 
brought down by a new revolution. So the 
wheels of History would revolve again with the 
same recurrent phases of disorder and tyranny, 
and future students would be taught to recog- 
nize one more "Age," that of the Proletariat, 



THE FREEDOM OF MEN 231 

following on the Ages of Ecclesiasticism, Mili- 
tarism, and Capitalism. Become supreme, the 
Labor leaders of the future would no more hesi- 
tate to use machine-guns against the mob than 
any other panic-stricken riders of the whirlwind. 
But if it be held that organization based on 
local communities is essential to the stable and 
therefore peaceable life of Nations, then those 
local communities must have as complete and 
balanced a life of their own as is compatible 
with the life of the Nation itself. In no other 
way can you prevent a " class and interest" 
organization from crossing powerfully your lo- 
cality organization. As long as you allow a 
great metropolis to drain most of the best 
young brains from the local communities, to 
cite only one aspect of what goes on, so long 
must organization center unduly in the me- 
tropolis and become inevitably an organization 
of nation-wide classes and interests. I believe 
that whether we look at the matter from the 
point of view of the freedom of men or of na- 
tions we shall come to the same conclusion; 
that the one thing essential is to displace class 
organization, with its battle-cries and merely 
palliative remedies, by substituting an organic 
ideal, that of the balanced life of provinces, and 
under the provinces of the lesser communities. 



t%% DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

Let us approach the matter from the other 
end of the argument, that of the Freedom of 
Men. What does the ordinary man want? 
Mill says that after food and home he wants 
liberty, but the more modern democrat lays 
stress not merely on freedom to take Oppor- 
tunity, but on the equality of Opportunity 
itself. It is for Opportunity to realize what is 
in him, to live a life of ideas and of action for 
the realization of those ideas, that the healthy 
man — in ever-increasing number — is asking. 
His ideas may be of love and of the noble up- 
bringing of his children, or of his craft and 
delight in his dexterity, or of religion and the 
saving of souls, or of excellence in sport of some 
kind, or of the constitution of society and its 
improvement, or of the appreciation of beauty 
and of artistic expression; but in one way or 
another he wishes for the glow of intelligent 
life, and incidentally for a recognition of his 
human dignity. 

By general elementary education we have 
begun to teach the art of manipulating ideas 
to those who in Ancient Society were slaves. 
The wholly unlettered man thinks only in 
concrete terms; therefore it was that the great 
religious teachers have spoken slowly in para- 
bles. The unlettered man is not open either to 
the pleasures or the dangers of idealism. Un- 



THE FREEDOM OF MEN 233 

doubtedly our Western communities are passing 
through a dangerous stage in this generation. 
Half-educated people are in a very susceptible' 
condition, and the world to-day consists mainly 
of half-educated people. They are capable of 
seizing ideas, but they have not attained to the 
habit of testing them and of suspense of mind 
in the meantime. In other words, most people 
to-day are very open to "suggestion," a fact 
well known to the experienced in elections, 
who rarely stop to reason with their audiences. 
Suggestion is the method of the German propa- 
gandist. 

Now the expression "Equality of Oppor- 
tunity" involves two things. In the first place 
control, because, given average human nature, 
there cannot be equality without control; and 
in the second place it implies freedom to do and 
not merely to think, or, in other words, oppor- 
tunity to bring ideas to the test of action. Mr. 
Bernard Shaw says that "He who can, does; 
he who cannot, teaches." If you interpret the 
words "can" and "cannot" as implying oppor- 
tunity and lack of opportunity, then this rather 
cynical epigram conveys a vital truth. 1 Those 
who are allowed opportunities of testing their 
ideas become responsible thinkers, but those 
who get no such opportunity may continue, for 

1 Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman, 12th edition, p. 230. 



234 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

a time, to enjoy ideas, but irresponsibly and, 
as we say, academically. The latter condition 
is precisely that of a large part of our intelligent 
newspaper-reading working classes to-day, and 
some of them know it and regret it. 

What is the bane of our modern industrial 
life? Surely monotony — monotony of work 
and of a petty social and communal life. No 
wonder our men took refuge before the War in 
betting on football. Most of the responsible 
decisions are reserved for a few, and those few 
are not even seen at their work, for they are 
away in the big centers. 

What is it that in the last two or three gen- 
erations has given such strength to the Nation- 
ality movement? Nationality had no great hold 
in the Middle Ages, or indeed in Modern Times 
until the nineteenth century. It has arisen as 
the modern States have not only increased in size, 
but have also grasped wider functions within the 
Community. Nationalist movements are based 
on the restlessness of intelligent young men who 
wish for scope to live the life of ideas and to be 
among those who "can " because they are allowed 
to do. In the old Greek and in the Mediaeval 
World, Society was so loosely knit that there was 
plenty of scope in any considerable town. Is it 
not that fact which makes town-history so in- 
teresting until we come to the eighteenth cen- 



THE FREEDOM OF MEN 235 

tury and then so banal? Take up the history of 
one of our more significant British cities, and see 
whether that be not true. When you come to 
the last few generations it becomes mere statistic 
of material growth ; at the best the town becomes 
specialized in some important way, but it ceases 
to be a complete organism. All its institutions 
are second-rate, because its best people have gone 
away, unless it have some one establishment or 
industry of more than local fame, and that es- 
tablishment or industry usually crushes rather 
than develops real local life. 

Why were Athens and Florence the wonderful 
founts of Civilization which have made them the 
teachers of the world? They were small cities as 
we how count the size of cities, but they were 
sovereign cities both in the political and economic 
sense. The men who shook hands in their streets, 
and whose families intermarried, were not merely 
rival masters in the same industry or competing 
merchants on the same exchange; every principal 
category of supreme human activity was repre- 
sented in one intimate circle. Think of the choice 
of activites open to the able young Florentine, 
to be practiced, remember, in and for his native 
town, and with no need to go away to some dis- 
tant capital. Instead of Mayor he might be 
Prime Minister; instead of captain of Territorials 
he might be a general leading the town-force in 



236 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

actual battle — a small battle no doubt, but 
enough to give the fullest scope to the activity of 
his mind; if he were a painter, sculptor, or archi- 
tect he would be employed on the monuments of 
his own place instead of seeing them designed by 
some visiting great man. Of course no one sug- 
gests that you should or could return to institu- 
tions on the Athenian or Florentine scale, but the 
fact remains that you have drained your local 
life of most of its value and interest by the devel- 
opment of nation-wide class organization. 

Are you quite sure that the gist of the demand 
for Home Rule in Ireland, and in a less degree in 
Scotland, does not come mainly from young men 
who are agitating, though they do not fully real- 
ize it, for equality of opportunity rather than 
against the assumed wickedness of England? 
The Bohemians have achieved a very remarkable 
economic prosperity under the Austrian tyranny, 
and yet they fight for their Czecho-Slovak Na- 
tionality. Is there not something of the same 
human truth in the refractoriness of the shop 
stewards in our factories against the Union Ex- 
ecutives away in London offices? 

It is the principle of Laissez-faire which has 
played such havoc with our local life. For a hun- 
dred years we have bowed down before the Going 
Concern as though it were an irresistible God. 
Undoubtedly it is a Reality, but it can be bent 



THE FREEDOM OF MEN 237 

to your service if you have a policy inspired by 
an ideal. Laissez-faire was no such policy; it was 
mere surrender to fate. You tell me that cen- 
tralization is the "tendency " of the age : I reply 
to you that it is the blind tendency of every age — 
was it not said nineteen hundred years ago that 
"to him that hath shall be given"? 

Consider the growth of London. A population 
of a million a century ago has risen to be more 
than seven millions to-day; or, to state the fact 
with more essential point, the London of a cen- 
tury ago contained a sixteenth of the population of 
England and now it has a fifth. How has it come 
about? When Parliament was originally set up, 
you had not only to pay the members to get them 
to attend, so busy were they with their absorbing 
local life, but before long you had also to find the 
communities which failed to elect their represent- 
atives. That was the right condition of things, 
a federalization against strong local magnetisms. 
When Macadamized roads were introduced a 
star of them was made, radiating from London; 
they brought the life of the country up to London, 
sapping it for the growth of London. When the 
railways were constructed the main lines formed 
a star from London, and the expresses run up and 
down, feeding London, milking the country. 
Presently the State also must needs step in to 
accentuate the centralizing tendency by estab- 



238 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

lishing such services as the parcel post. Thus it 
has come about that the market-towns for a hun- 
dred miles around are degraded in respect of the 
variety of their life. 

Not in four out of five cases does the Londoner 
profit in any true sense from the change. He 
lives in a suburb; he is shot through a tube to an 
office-room in the City, and then shot back to 
his bedroom in the suburb; only on Saturdays 
and Sundays has he time for communal life, and 
then he amuses himself with neighbors who are 
tied to him by nothing essential. In the great 
majority of cases he never comes into living con- 
tact with a large and trained mind except through 
the printed page: for him, as for the industrial 
worker in the country, his life of ideas is detached 
from his responsible life, and both suffer infinitely 
in consequence. 

Centralization, however, is only one form of a 
more general process which I would call the seg- 
regation of social and economic functions owing 
to the national fatalism in the presence of the 
Going Concern. You have allowed industrial 
life to crowd certain districts and to leave other 
districts poor. I grant that in the past that was 
inevitable to some extent owing to the need of 
generating power near the collieries, but not to 
the extent that has occurred. By proper control 
you could have substituted a "village region,'' 



THE FREEDOM OF MEN 239 

with a community dependent on each factory or 
group of small factories, wherein rich and poor, 
masters and men, might have been held together 
in a neighborly responsible relationship; but you 
have allowed instead the East and West Ends 
to grow up in your great cities. Surely the essen- 
tial characteristic of true statesmanship is fore- 
sight, the prevention of social disease; but our 
method for a century past has been to drift, and 
when things became bad we applied palliative 
remedies — factory legislation, housing legislation, 
and so forth. As things stand to-day, the only 
organic remedy is at any cost to loosen out the 
town. 

These ideas apply not only to industry but 
also to our educational institutions and the 
learned professions. Our English system is to 
buy — we must use plain words, for the element 
of competition among the colleges exists — the 
best young brains by means of scholarships open 
to national competition. In the middle of last 
century we, in large measure, abolished the sys- 
tem of close scholarships, which tied particular 
schools to particular colleges; that was, in my 
opinion, by far the healthier system. By social 
custom you add to your scholars a number of 
other fortunate boys from well-to-do homes scat- 
tered over the country. So you recruit your pub- 
lic schools and your Oxford and Cambridge; from 



&40 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

the beginning you lift your lads out of their local 
environment. From the Universities many of 
them pass into a centralized Civil Service, a cen- 
tralized legal profession, and even a centralized 
medical profession. In London they wait, eating 
out their hearts during their best years. A few 
of them come through and shine in a great but 
unnaturally segregated competition of wits, and 
you complain of your Government by lawyers! 
The whole system results from historical momen- 
tum; when the Midlands, the East, and the South 
of England were all of England that counted, 
Oxford and Cambridge were local Universities, 
and London was the natural market center of a 
single countryside. But in the past century the 
roads and the railways have enabled the Metrop- 
olis to attract to itself the careers that were des- 
tined for the inspiration of other countrysides. 
The natural place of an exceptional man is to be 
leading his own people and helping them to bear 
their burdens. Your exceptional brain is serving 
the nation best if it remains racy of its own par- 
ticular soil. 1 

One of the most serious difficulties in the way 
of the realization of the balanced local commu- 
nity lies in the difference of dialect spoken by the 

1 As a loyal son of Oxford who gratefully recognizes what he owes 
to his Alma Mater, I would not have her flourish less but more in chang- 
ing some of her lower functions for higher. 



THE FREEDOM OF MEN 241 

common people and the upper classes. In 
England after the Norman Conquest our peas- 
ants talked English, but our knights French, 
and our priests Latin, with the result that a 
knight felt himself more at home with a knight 
from France than with his own people, and so 
was it also with the priests. To-day there is a 
curious difference, it seems to me, in this respect, 
between the Scottish and English peoples. In 
England the upper professional classes go to 
the same schools and universities as the landed 
classes, and the merchants and captains of 
industry also send their sons to those schools. 
Therefore the line of social cleavage, as shown 
by speech and bearing, is between the upper 
and the lower middle classes. In Scotland, on 
the other hand, the people of the highest tier of 
society send their sons for the most part to the 
English Public Schools and the English Univer- 
sities, whereas the ministers of the Scottish 
Churches, the advocates in the Scottish Law 
Courts, and the doctors and schoolmasters are 
trained in the main in the local Universities, 
which are frequented by the sons of the shop- 
keepers and artisans to a greater extent than in 
England. The result, as I believe, is that the 
Scottish aristocracy has been, to a greater 
degree than in England, detached from the 
people. I do not blame them, for they have 



242 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

merely drifted in the grip of fate. It is said 
that a certain Scottish Baronet who had eight 
beautiful daughters approaching, some of them, 
to the age of marriage, put them all on a coach 
and drove them away from Edinburgh to Lon- 
don, because all the young Scotsmen of his ac- 
quaintance who had money, or the wits to make 
money, had already gone thither! In the end 
of the eighteenth century, and the beginning of 
the nineteenth, Edinburgh was one of the lamps 
of Europe, with its own particular tinge of 
flame. To-day it is one more instance of the 
futility of trying to separate the economic from 
the other aspects of the life either of a nation 
or a province. 

3JC 3JC Efs 3|s *f* *JC ^S 

Whether we reason downward from the Free- 
dom of Nations, or upward from the Freedom 
of Men, we come to the same conclusion. The 
nation which is to be fraternal towards other 
nations, must be independent in an economic 
as in every other sense; it must have and keep 
a complete and balanced life. But it cannot be 
independent if it is broken into classes and 
interests which are for ever seeking to range 
themselves for fighting purposes with the equiv- 
alent classes and interests of other nations. 
Therefore you must base national organization 



THE FREEDOM OF MEN 243 

on provincial communities. But if your prov- 
ince is to have any sufficient power of satisfy- 
ing local aspirations it must, except for the 
federal reservations, have its own complete and 
balanced life. That is precisely what the real 
Freedom of Men requires — scope for a full life 
in their own locality. The organization by 
nation-wide classes and interests is the outcome 
of conflict, but it cannot satisfy, for it removes 
the larger careers away to the metropolis. 
Moreover the slums, and most other material 
afflictions of the people, are the outcome of 
impotence of local life, for they all result from 
offenses against the principle of keeping that 
life complete and balanced. 

Provinces of complete life, of course, imply a 
federal system. It is not a mere decentraliza- 
tion which is contemplated, but decentraliza- 
tion of the different social functions to the same 
local units. Undoubtedly that is the tendency 
at the present time, in the Anglo-Saxon world, 
in regard to the administration of Government. 
The United States, Canada, Australia, and 
South Africa are all, in greater or less degree, 
federal, and in Britain we seem to be not very 
far from becoming so. Only tjie Irish question 
blocks the way, but it is intrinsically a small 
question, and we ought not to allow the quarrels 
of four million people to impede permanently 



244 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

the organic remedy of the ills of more than 
forty millions. A division of England into 
Northern and Southern Provinces would prob- 
ably be needed in order to remove the fact of 
the predominant partner, but from the point of 
view here taken that division would in itself be 
a good thing. To achieve the object in view it 
would not, however, be enough to give to your 
provinces merely "gas and water" powers; 
they must be so involved in the economic life 
of their regions that both masters and men will 
base their organizations on the Provincial Areas. 
If every unit of society — the Nation, the Prov- 
ince, the locality — were entitled, nay, were de- 
sired, to take appropriate steps to maintain the, 
completeness and balance of its life, the need 
for the widespreading organization of any class 
or interest, save for informative purposes, would 
gradually cease to be urgent. 

Consider the life of trees. In the forests of 
nature competition is severe, and no tree attains 
to the full and balanced growth of which it is 
capable. The trees of the middle forest struggle 
upward to the light; those of the border spread 
outward one-sidedly; and in the slum depths are 
all manner of rottenness and parasitism. If, 
as in Dante's dream, there were spirits im- 
prisoned in the trees, one might imagine a forest 
league of the foliage against the roots for send- 



THE FREEDOM OF MEN 245 

ing up too many trunks, and a forest league of 
the roots against the foliage for keeping away 
the sweet light and air. But they would be 
futile leagues, because each tree consists of roots 
and foliage. The Landscape Gardener of civili- 
zation, with his organic remedies, can alone 
achieve the perfect beauty of trees. He plants 
them apart, so that they may grow independ- 
ently, each according to the ideal of its kind; 
he guides the sapling, prunes the young tree, 
and cuts away disease from the mature tree. 
So we enjoy one of the most inspiring sights on 
earth, a park of noble trees, each complete and 
balanced in its growth. Only the monkeys and 
squirrels, which leap from branch to branch, 
have suffered — the elusive international ex- 
ploiters and profiteers of the forest. 

This parable of the Gardener contains also 
the idea that the functions of growth and con- 
trol are separate and should be kept separate. 
When officials of the State become socialistic, 
and try to initiate instead of merely assuring 
growth, they become less capable of their own 
proper function, which is criticism — understand- 
ing and sympathetic, but still criticism. The 
temper of criticism is incompatible with artistic 
and formative enthusiasm. We have had too 
little criticism based on steady watchfulness for 
the signs of unbalance in growth. The British 



246 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

Board of Trade under the regime of Laissez-faire 
was so penetrated with the advisability of doing 
nothing, that it had no appreciable machinery 
for even watching what the Going Concern was 
doing. Federal authorities of every description, 
whether of the League of Nations or of the Na- 
tions, should consist essentially of defensive and 
of outlook departments, and the watching or out- 
look departments should issue warnings, and re- 
peat those warnings, until, thus enlightened, pub- 
lic opinion in the localities concerned intervenes 
while there is yet time to prevent some monstrous 
outgrowth of the Going Concern from fatally up- 
setting the equilibrium of the world or of the na- 
tion. In the United States the care of agriculture 
is, I believe, left to the separate States, but the 
Federal Bureau of Agriculture it is which issues 
warnings of the need of conserving the natural 
resources of the country. In Rome we already 
have an International Agricultural Institute 
which collects the statistics of the world harvests, 
and seeks to steady markets and prices by timely 
warnings; it has rendered considerable service 
to the Allies during this War. 

I have no doubt that I shall be told by prac- 
tical men that the ideal of complete and bal- 
anced economic growth in each locality is con- 
trary to the whole tendency of the age, and is, 
in fact, archaic. I shall be told that you can only 



THE FREEDOM OF MEN 247 

get a great and cheap production by the method 
of world-organization and local specialization. 
I admit that such is the present tendency, and 
that it may give you maximum material results 
for a while. But if you breed animals, does there 
not come a time when you have gone as far as 
you can with inbreeding, and must you not then 
resort again to cross-breeding? 

Athens and Florence were great because they 
saw life whole. If you pursue relentlessly the 
idols of efficiency and cheapness, you will give 
us a world in which the young will never see life 
but only an aspect of life; national and inter- 
national organizers will alone hold the keys ad- 
mitting to the Observatory of the complete view. 
Is it in that way that you will get a continuous 
supply of fruitful brains, and happy, because 
intellectually active workers? All specialization 
contains the seeds of death; the most daring army 
must, at times, wait for the supply columns to 
come up. In the growth of brains and content- 
ment something far more subtle is involved than 
any technical education or healthy housing. Is 
it quite certain that at the end of a century of 
refusal to get rich as quickly as possible, we 
should not have been far richer than we are? 

I know that in this War you have set your 
controllers, and your international committees 
of controllers, to manage vast trades as single 



248 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

concerns, and that they have not let us starve. 
But in the crisis you have very rightly been 
using your capital of intellect and experience. 
Those men are the men that they are because 
they have built up private businesses with the 
fear of bankruptcy ever before them: they have 
grown up with their business lives always in 
their hands. Great organizations, whether of 
combines or Government services, in that they 
afford a sheltered life, will not give you unlim- 
ited crops of such men. 

You urge that credit and insurance must 
have broad bases, and I agree: their function 
is to average away local deficiencies due to the 
varying seasons and the varying success of 
undertakings. But let us none the less recog- 
nize that they present the danger of a financial 
control of the world. Your League of Nations 
may have to take them in hand, lest we be 
ruled by one only of the "interests" of society. 
There are two courses open to us in regard to 
them : to control them federally, or to fight them 
and balance them by the international organiza- 
tion of other "interests." The federal author- 
ity, whether of the League or the Nation, is 
constituted of communities of complete growth, 
and cannot, from its nature, aspire to Empire, 
since it consists everywhere of balanced human- 
ity. But great specialist organizations, guided 



THE FREEDOM OF MEN 249 

by experts, will inevitably contend for the 
upper hand, and the contest must end in the 
rule of one or other type of expert. That is 
Empire, for it is unbalanced. 



Do you realize that we have now made the 
circuit of the world, and that every system is 
now a closed system, and that you can now 
alter nothing without altering the balance of 
everything, and that there are no more desert 
shores on which the jetsam of incomplete 
thought can rest undisturbed? Let us attempt 
logical, symmetrical thought, but practical, 
cautious action, because we have to do with a 
mighty Going Concern. If you stop it, or even 
slow down its running, it will punish you relent- 
lessly. If you let it run without guidance, it 
will take you over the cataract again. You 
cannot guide it by setting up mere fences, and 
by mending those fences if it breaks them down, 
because this Going Concern consists of hundreds 
of millions of human beings who are " pursuing' ' 
happiness, and they will swarm over all your 
fences like an army of ants. You can only 
guide Humanity by the attraction of ideals. 
That is why Christianity wins on, after nineteen 
centuries, through all the impediments set up by 
criticism of its creeds and its miracles. 



250 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

What we need, in my belief, to guide our 
Reconstruction is a presumption of statesman- 
ship in favor of the balanced nation, and the 
balanced province, sinning neither with the 
Free Trader nor the Protectionist. If we persist 
for a generation or two, with such an ideal 
before us, we may gradually change the Going 
Concern, so that we shall have fraternal nations 
and fraternal provinces, instead of warring, 
organized interests ever striving to extend 
their limits to the international field in order 
to outflank opposing interests which still lag on 
the merely national scale. Remember how 
that curious negative ideal of Laissez-faire did 
through a couple of generations gradually as- 
similate the whole texture of British society, 
so that it has taken this World-War to over- 
throw the vested interests which grew up. 

At present, it seems to me, we are thinking 
out our Reconstruction piecemeal, according 
to this and that detached ideal of the pre- War 
philanthropist — housing, temperance, industrial 
conciliation, and the rest of them. But if you 
build three hundred thousand new houses, and 
put them merely where they are "wanted," 
you may but be drifting again, though with 
heavier ballast. 

In the War we have gradually risen to the 
conception of the single strategical command, 



THE FREEDOM OF MEN 251 

and of the single economic control. Have you 
the courage for measures of like scope in regard 
to Peace, though more subtle and less executive, 
because they will deal with growth and not 
with destruction? 

" The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars 
But in ourselves, that we are underlings." 



VIII 

POSTSCRIPT 

Since the writing of this book I have fought a 
Parliamentary election in Scotland, with a 
Liberal and a Socialist for my opponents. Of 
Liberalism there is nothing just now to be 
usefully said; a sturdy individualism will always 
be one of the elements of character in our British 
race, whatever the fate of the political party 
which was its nineteenth-century expression. 
But the ever-recurrent propaganda of Socialism 
is at present in a very significant phase. Mere 
Bureaucratic Socialism has been criticised by 
events of late; the more we know of the working 
of dominant officialdom during the War, the 
less likely, I think, are we to desire it for a 
permanent master. My Socialist opponent was 
out to take away property in land and to abol- 
ish interest on capital; in other words, he would 
begin with a confiscatory revolution; but that 
was not of the essence of his position. His 
supporters — young men with a burning faith 
in their eyes, though often without the full 
power of expressing their argument — were, at 
almost every meeting, boldly defensive of the 

252 



POSTSCRIPT 253 

Russian Bolsheviks. There are two sides to 
Bolshevism; there is the mere violence and 
tyranny of the Jacobin, upthrown at a certain 
stage of most great revolutions; and there is 
the "Syndicalist" idealism. To do them justice, 
it is the latter aspect of Bolshevism which really 
attracts and holds my young Scottish antago- 
nists. The Bolsheviks are in revolt against a 
Parliamentarism based on local communities 
or, as they would put it, on so many social 
pyramids each with its Capitalist at the top. 
Their ideal is of a federation of vocational 
Soviets or unions — Soviets of workmen, of peas- 
ants, and, if you will, of professional men. 
Therefore the Bolsheviks, both in Petrograd 
and Berlin, have consistently opposed the meet- 
ing of national assemblies for the purpose of 
framing Parliamentary constitutions on the 
Western "bourgeois" model. Their revolt is 
towards an organization by interests rather 
than localities. 1 For the reasons stated in this 
book, such an organization would, in my belief, 
lead inevitably to the Marxian War of inter- 
national classes, of Proletariat against Bourge- 
oisie, and finally of one section of the Proletariat 
against the other sections — already the Russian 

1 The vocational soviet of the peasants is only incidentally local; 
it is not local in the fuller sense of combining various local interests 
into a community. 



254 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

town-workers are at issue with the Russian 
peasants. The end could only be world-anarchy 
or a world-tyranny. 

Thus I come back to the quiet of my library 
with the conviction that what I have written 
is pertinent to the hot currents of real life in 
this great crisis of humanity. Our old English 
conception of the House of Commons or Com- 
munities, the American conception of the Fed- 
eration of States and Provinces, and the new 
ideal of the League of Nations are all of them 
opposed to the policies cast in the tyrannical 
molds of East Europe and the Heartland, 
whether Dynastic or Bolshevik. It may be the 
case that Bolshevik tyranny is an extreme 
reaction from Dynastic tyranny, but it is none 
the less true that the Russian, Prussian, and 
Hungarian plains, with their widespread uni- 
formity of social conditions, are favorable alike 
to the march of militarism and to the propa- 
ganda of syndicalism. Against this two-headed 
Eagle of land-power the Westerners and the 
Islanders must struggle. Even in their own 
peninsulas and islands modern methods of 
communication are so leveling natural barriers 
that organization by interests constitutes a 
real threat. In the Heartland, where physical 
contrasts are few, it is only with the aid of a 
conscious ideal, shaping political life in the 



POSTSCRIPT 955 

direction of nationalities, that we shall be able 
to entrench true freedom. If only as a basis 
for "penetrating" this dangerous Heartland, 
the Oceanic peoples must strive to root ever 
more firmly their own organization by localities, 
each locality with as complete and balanced a 
life of its own as circumstances may permit of. 
The effort must go downward through the 
provinces to the cities. East-ends and West- 
ends divide our cities into castes; at whatever 
sacrifice we must tone away such contrasts. 
The countryside, in which the successful leaders 
visibly serve the interests of their weaker breth- 
ren, must be our ideal. 

There was a time when a man addressed his 
"friends and neighbors." We still have our 
friends, but too often they are scattered over 
the land and belong to our own caste in society. 
Or, if they happen to be near us, is it not be- 
cause our caste has gathered apart into its own 
quarter of the town? So was it in the early 
Middle Ages, when we are told that three men 
might meet in the market-place the one obeying 
the Roman law, another the customs of the 
Franks, and a third those of the Goths. So is 
it to-day in India with Hindu, and Moham- 
medan, and Christian. So was it not either 
in fourteenth-century Florence, or Periclean 
Athens, or Elizabethan England. 



256 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

With too many of us, in our urban and sub- 
urban civilization, that grand old word Neigh- 
bor has fallen almost into desuetude. It is for 
Neighborliness that the world to-day calls 
aloud, and for a refusal to gad ever about — 
merely because of modern opportunities for 
communication. Let us recover possession of 
ourselves, lest we become the mere slaves of 
the world's geography, exploited by material- 
istic organizers. Neighborliness or fraternal 
duty to those who are our fellow-dwellers, is 
the only sure foundation of a happy citizenship. 
Its consequences extend upward from the city 
through the province to the nation, and to the 
world league of nations. It is the cure alike of 
the slumdom of the poor and of the boredom 
of the rich, and of war between classes and war 
between nations. 



APPENDIX 

NOTE ON AN INCIDENT AT THE QUAI D'ORSAY 
25th JANUARY, 1919 

The representatives of the Allied Nations were assem- 
bled in the second plenary session of their Conference at 
Paris. A resolution was before them to appoint committees 
for the purpose of reporting on the proposed League of 
Nations and other matters. The constitution of the com- 
mittees, giving two members to each of the five Great 
Powers (U. S. A., British Empire, France, Italy, Japan), 
and five members to the Smaller Powers collectively, had 
been settled by the Council of Ten, representing only the 
Great Powers, and this constitution was now brought up 
at the plenary session for endorsement. There was not 
unnaturally discontentment among the Smaller Powers. 
Sir Robert Borden, on behalf of Canada, asked by whom 
and on what authority the constitution of the committees 
had been decided; the question should have been sub- 
mitted to the Conference. The delegates of Belgium, 
Brazil, Serbia, Greece, Portugal, Czecho-Slovakia, Ru- 
mania, Siam, and China rose in turn to claim special repre- 
sentation for their several countries. Then M. Clemen- 
ceau interposed from his presidential chair, where he sat 
between Mr. Wilson and Mr. Lloyd George. He pointed 
out that at the cessation of hostilities, the Great Powers 
had twelve million men on the field of battle; that they 
might have decided the future of the World on their own 
initiative; but that, inspired by the new ideals, they had 

257 



258 DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY 

invited the Smaller Powers to cooperate with them. The 
resolution was passed, nemine contradicente, without al- 
teration. 

Thus the rule of the world still rests upon force, notwith- 
standing the juridical assumption of equality between sov- 
ereign States, whether great or small. The theme of this 
book, that we must base our proposed League on Realities, 
if we would have it last, holds good. Let it be remarked, 
moreover, that the number of the Great Powers— five- 
is precisely the total of the pre-war Dual Alliance (Triple 
only with Italy) and Triple Entente, whose hostility 
caused the War. It follows that we shall be able to main- 
tain our League as long as the five Powers, now allied, 
continue to agree. Their number is not sufficient to pre- 
vent a bid for predominance on the part of one or two of 
them. No doubt a new Germany and a new Russia will 
some day increase them to seven. Perhaps the Smaller 
Powers, taking note of the naked fact which was exposed 
by this incident, will set about federating among them- 
selves. A Scandinavian group, a group of the Middle 
Tier of East Europe (Poland to Jugo-Slavia), and a Span- 
ish South American group (if not also including Brazil) 
may all, perhaps, be attainable. In any case the League 
should do service in bringing the opinion of mankind to 
bear for the just revision of obsolescent treaties before 
they become unbearable misfits. But let us be rid of 
cant: Democracy must reckon with Reality. 



INDEX 



Actium, Sea-battle of, 51, 74 

Administrators, their function, 14 

iEgean sea, 44-46 

Afghan war, first, in 1839, 167 

Air navigation, 81 

Alexander, King of Macedonia, 48, 
50, 66, 113 

Alsatians, 154 

American conceptions opposed to 
policies of E. Europe, 254 

America, (North and South), 81, 
82,83 

Antony and Caesar, 55, 74 

Arabia, 96, 97; Reconquered by 
Britain for the Arabs, 134 

Arabian Tableland, 112 

Archipelago, 44, 45 

Asia Minor, 130 

Asia (Northern), The Inaccessible 
Coast, 92 

Athenian Fleet, 46 

Athens and Florence, 247; Teach- 
ers of the World, reasons cited, 
235 

Attila, leader of Huns, 121 

Austria, Assassination of Archduke 
Franz Ferdinand, 189; German 
advance of in 18th Century, 160 

Autocracy a " Going Concern," 181 

Balkan Corridor, Germans given 
first steps towards, 168 

Balkans, The, Austrian and Rus- 
sian rivalry in, 162 

Baltic, The, 58, 203; Possibilities 



of preparing for war within, 215; 
Possibility to close by Land- 
power, 134 

Baltic and Mediterranean, The, 
Seven non-German peoples be- 
tween, 198-200; Russian bureau- 
cracy recruited from Germans of, 
161 

Belt inhabited by settled plowmen, 
113-114 

Berlin, dammed-up flood of Ger- 
man man-power set free, 1914, 
177 

Berlin-Bagdad visualized on men- 
tal relief map, 29 

Berlin and Vienna occupy Slav 
territory of Middle Ages, 155 

Bishop Leo, of Rome, 121 

Bismarck, Ambassador in Paris, 
152; Called to power at Berlin, 
152; Dual Alliance, 153; His 
basis of German Unity, 152; 
Part played by, in rivalry of 
Empires, 153; The Napoleon 
of Prussia, 23-24-25; Three 
Kaiser Alliance of (1872), 162; 
View of Free Trade, 171 

Black Sea, The, 58; Closed to 
Venetian and Genoese seamen, 
134 

Black and Baltic Seas, The, 203: 
Menace to League of Nations, 
206; Possibility of preparing 
for war within, 215; Possibility 
to close by Land-power, 134-135 



259 



260 



INDEX 



Bohemia, Slav Kingdom com- 
pletely incorporated into Ger- 
man Imperial System, 160 

Bolsheviks, in Petrograd and 
Berlin, 253; Jews chiefs of Rus- 
sian, 216; The Two-headed 
Eagle of land-power, 254; Their 
Ideal, 253. 

Bolshevism, Czechs, proof against, 
197; in North Russia, 145; Two 
Sides to, 253. 

"Border" peoples, Czechs and 
Slovaks, 201-202 

Bright, John, Advocate of Free 
Trade, 175 

Britain, General Election in 1919, 
252; Roman Invasion of, 55; 
and France in action against 
Russia in 1854, 167; and Russia, 
rivalry during 19th Century, 165 

British Board of Trade, 246; Com- 
mand of the sea, 150 

British Empire a "Going Con- 
cern," 209; League of Inde- 
pendency, 209; Relation of 
equality among governing units 
of, 209 

British Insular base, 68 

British Sea-power, 75, 76, 149 
After Napoleonic war, 150 
Attempts to overthrow, 71 
In West Europe, 150; Outcome 
of, 72; Overseas Empire founded 
on, 75; Position in the Indian 
Ocean, 72-73; The real base 
historically of, 70. 

British trade with Indies, 164 

Cambon, M. Jules, Report of, 189 
Camelmen and Horsemen Raids, 
114 



Caesar, sea operations of, 55, 
74 

Carnot. 17 

Chamberlain, Joseph, 32 

Charlemagne, Empire Erected by, 
59 

Civilization, Social organization 
the basis of, 5 

Class- Warfare, 230 

Classical History, Great events 
of, 112-113. 

Cobden, Richard, The Great 
advocate of Free Trade, 179 

Columbus, 65, 90 

Constantinople, Eastern Capital 
of Roman Emperors at, 133; 
France and Britain allied in ac- 
tion in regard to, 169; Local base 
of Mediterranean sea-power, 
167; Possibilities and probabil- 
ities, 215; Suggested as the 
Washington of League of Na- 
tions, 215 

Czecho-Slovaks, action on Tran- 
siberian line, 146 

Czechs, "Border" people, 201; 
Extraordinary Political Capac- 
ity of, 197; Proof against Bol- 
shevism, 197. 

Da Gama, The explorer, 65 
Dark Ages, The, 61; Piracy on 

the seas during, 123 
Day-light saving, introduction of, 

17 
Delhi, 126 
Delta, The Nile, 41 
Democracies, German view of, 190; 

of the west, 20 
Democracy, momentum difficult 

of change in a, 180 



INDEX 



261 



Democracy and Despotism, al- 
liance between, 161 

Democracy and War, 31-32 

Democrat, The, 33 

Democrat and organizer, 22; men- 
tal outlook of, 33 

Democratic Idealism, The Nem- 
esis of, 22; The oldest and the 
modern, 11, 12 

Democratic movement 1848-1850, 
151 

Desert, The, 41 

Dinaric Alps, 131, 134 

Discipline, social and military, 18 

Dual Alliance, 153 

Dutch Java, 86 

East-ends and west-ends, 255 

Eastern Question, The, Essence 
of resettlement territorial, 191 

Economic Ideal, fiscal independ- 
ence, 218, 219; Independence 
of fraternal nations, 242; Reality 
of man power considered, 172; 
Specialization, 220, 221 

Economists, Political, 173 

Edinburgh, 242 

Egypt, Early conditions and Phys- 
ical advantages of, 42, 43 

Egypt and Palestine, 166 

English Educational System, 239; 
Nation simple in structure, 69; 
Nationalities, rise of, 122; Revo- 
lution, 148 

Europe, A world apart, 62; Danger 
of war in 1840, 169; Medical 
siege of, 64; The real, 147 

Europe, East, condition of, stabil- 
ity, 196; Division of, precedent 
to a League of Nations, 195; 
German domination over 



Slavism, 161; Middle States 
of important strategical sig- 
nificance in, 205; The Middle 
Tier, importance of, in breaking 
up, 212-213; Suggestions and 
reasons for division, organiza- 
tion, and transportation in, 
200-201; Tyrannical Policies, 
English and American concep- 
tion opposed to, 254; United 
by The Holy League, 150 

Europe, East and West, 147 et 
seq.; Fundamental opposition 
between, 153; Two principal 
elements in, 154 

Europe, West, British Naval 
power in, 150 

European, The, Cradle-land of, 
61; Water paths, 63 

France and Belgium in action 

against Russia 1854, 167 
France and Italy "Going Con- 
cerns," 210 
Franco-Russian Alliance 1895, 161 
Frederick, The Great, Sole or- 
ganizer of Prussia, 26; Terri- 
tory taken from Austria under, 
157 
Free Trade, Adoption with im- 
mediate advantage, 175; and 
Protection, 181-182; Cobden, 
advocate of, 175; Indian mar- 
ket, 180; Specialization and its 
results, 179; "The policy of 
the strong," 173; World's view 
of, 175. 
Freedom of Men, 226 et seq. 
French Nationalities, rise of, 122 
French Revolution, 8, 48, 227 
"Friends and Neighbors," 255 



262 



INDEX 



Geographical, description of The 
Great Lowland, 93-95; De- 
scription of Heartland, 93; 
Knowledge of North and South 
Poles, 39; Perspective, 39-40; 
Realities, 38, 40, 93, 172; Unit, 
the largest, 84, 85 

Geography, Physical facts of, 3 

German, design on Heartland, 137; 
Fleet, surrender of, Firth of 
Forth, 89; Kaiserdom, French 
and British opposition to, 171; 
"Kultur," danger to outside 
world from, 172; man-power 
set free 1914, 177; Maps, 27-28- 
29; Maps in sphere of economics, 
30-31; Military Colonies, 137; 
National Economists, 173; Set- 
tlements, 160; Strategy, political 
necessity, 191; Universities, 26; 
War Song, 169 

Germans, Their Real-Politik, 9-10, 
28 

Germany, Berlin University, 26; 
Bolsheviks in Berlin, 253; Eco- 
nomic offensive, penetration 
abroad, 174; In grip of Economic 
fate, 190; Man-power, building 
up, 176; Scientific tariff, 174- 
175; Unsheaths Economic Sword 
in 1878, 174. 

Gibraltar, 44 

Globe, The, Proportions of, 86-87 

"Going Concern," The, 22; in 
Asia and Africa, 217; Au- 
tocracy and, 181; British pros- 
perity due to, 175; Control of, 
224; In the future, 218; Man- 
power dependent on, 172; Mo- 
mentum difficult of change, 180; 
Reality of, 208; Relentless fact, 



177; Society a, 12; The great 
economic Reality, 182; Three 
attitudes of mind towards, 
221, 222, 223; Uncontrolled de- 
velopment, danger of, 248, 249 

Great Island, The, proportions 
and relations of, 80, 81, 82 

Great Lowland, The, 93. 

Hamburg, 191 

Hamilton, Alexander, 218 

Hannibal, 50, 66, 74 

Heartland, The, 93-97; Cossack 
advance over, 141; Geographical 
threat to World liberty, 186; 
German designs on, 137; Im- 
mense geographical realities of, 
107; Northern and Southern, 
100-103, 107; Russian Czardom 
in, 137; Strategical definition 
of, 135; Under present day con- 
ditions, 140; western regions of, 
127 

Hellenic Tribes, 46 

Hereford Cathedral, 110 

History, America and England, 
parallelism between, 85; Clas- 
sical, great events of, 112-113; 
Effects of Trafalgar on world's, 
163; lessons of, and instances, 
195; on the map, 156-157; 
Recorded, The beginning of, 
108 

Holy League, The, 150, 151 

Horsemen and Camelmen raids, 
114 

House of Commons, old English 
idea of, 228 

Hungarian plains, cultivation of, 
117, 118 

Huns, The, 121 



INDEX 



263 



Idealism, European, in 1848, 8; 
French, in 1789, 8; National, 
227; Democratic, 227; Nemesis 
of, 22; Two tendencies of, 11 

Idealists, Influence of, 10-11 

Indies, The, British trade with, 
164, 165; Navigable Rivers of, 
106; Traffic to, 66-67 

Industrial Life, 238; Monotony 
the bane of modern, 234 

International re-settlement, 185 

Ionian Sea, 46 

Island of Crete, 45, 74 

Jerusalem, Church of the Holy 

Sepulchre at, 110 
Jew, The, 216 

Kaiser Wilhelm, 31 

Kiel, German Fleet at, 135 

Kipling, 31 

Kottbus, Circle of, 155 

Krakatoa, Volcanic eruption in 

1883, at, 40 
"Kultur" and Democracy, 173 
"Kultur," German, 160 
"Kultur" and German maps, 

27-28-29 

Lancashire Cotton Industry, 178 
Latin Christendom, 57; Magyar 

Turks bulwark to, 123 
Latin Civilization, peoples of, 61 
League of Nations, 4-6; Division 
of Europe precedent to, 195- 
196; Essential conditions, 34, 
206, 208; Need of reasonable 
equality of Power in, 211; 
Principle of Independence 
within the, 218; Reality of 
the "Going Concern" to reckon 



with, 208; Reality the basis, 
258; Supreme organ of United 
Humanity, 203; The test of, 212; 
United States of America in, 
211 
London, Rapid growth of, 237, 238 

Macedonia, 74 

Macedonians, end first cycle of 
sea-power, 48; Led into Arabia 
under King Alexander, 113; 
Made Mediterranean a "Closed 
Sea," 48; Sea-power, 113 

Magyar Alliance with Prussia, 204; 
Economic Life till 19th century, 
123 

Magyar Hungary conquered by 
the Turks, 134 

Magyars and Bulgarians, 204 

Manchuria, 120 

Manila, British Fleet at, 75-76 

Man-power, economic reality con- 
sidered, 172 

Map, Mental relief, 29 

Mediterranean Sea, 44-54 

Mehemet Ali, 167 

Middle Ages, 75; Early, 255; 
England and France in the, 154; 
Rival sea-bases during the, 68 

Middle Tier, Importance of, in 
breaking up the, 212-213 

Mongolia, Physical aspects of, 
120, 125 

Napoleon, 8, 17, 22-23-25, 85; 
At Moscow, 149; Limitation of 
Prussian Army by, 194; mod- 
ern importance of Egypt and 
Palestine given by, 166; The 
organizer, 149 

Napoleonic War, 150 



264 



INDEX 



National Economy of Germany, 

173 
Nationality movement, 234 
Neighborliness, The world's call 

to-day, 256 
Neighbors and Friends, 255 
Nile, The, 41, 74 

Norsemen, 64-65; Raids by, 55 
North and South Americas, 81, 

82,83 

OlmGtz, fatal conference at, 151 

Organization, dependent on dis- 
cipline, 17-18; National, Basis 
of, 243-244; Basis for lasting, 
228; by Classes and interests, 
229 

Organizer, The, 14-20 

Ottoman Turks, 134 

Palestine, Jewish National Seat, 
216 

Panama Canal, 76 

Parable of the Gardener, 245 

Paris Resolutions, 194 

Persians, sea-raid, failure of, 48 

Peter the Great, 161 

Petrograd, 161; Bolsheviks in, 
253 

Phoenician Coast, 44 

Phoenicians, 48 

Ploughmen, 137 

Poland, The Poles, 199-200 

Political Economists, 173 

Political Economy of Britain, 173 

Political moralists, 33 

Politics, The first international, 
108 

Population of Globe, 87 

Productive power, 193; Impor- 
tance of, 13, 14 



Protection and Free Trade, 181, 
182 

Quai D'Orsay incident, 257-258 

Real-Politik, 9-10, 28 

Realities, Basis of proposed League 
of Nations, 258; Geographical 
and economic, depicted, 37; In 
reconstruction, 256-257; League 
of Nations must reckon with, 
206-207; Of the Heartland 
Continent, 91-92, 93, 107 

Reconstruction, Elemental prin- 
ciples of, 250; History one of the 
great Realities in, 156-157 

Revolutions, 16-17 

Roberts, Lord, 32 

Rome, Frontier of 167; Inter- 
national Agricultural Institute 
in, 246; The Mediterranean sea- 
power, 133; Wane of Land- 
power of, 55 

Roman Emperors, Capital of, 
133 

Rosebery, Lord, 32 

Rumania, 203 

Russia, Britain and France against 
in 1854, 167; Collapse of, 
86; Fall of Czardom, 9; First 
powerful tenant of Heartland, 
172; German influence in, 161; 
Land boundaries of, 142; Peter 
the Great, 161; Physical and 
social aspects of, 143, 145; 
Railways in, 145, 146; Revolu- 
tion in, 18, 86; Stress after 
Japanese War, 188; Tariff 
Treaty with Germany, 189; 
Under Czar Nicholas, 167; Vast 
forest-land of, 143 



INDEX 



265 



Sahara, The, 95, 96; Natural 
features of, 127 

St. Petersburg, 161 

Saracen Camelmen, land and sea 
raids of, 55, 56; Empire over- 
thrown, 117; Power a bid for 
World Empire, 115; Sea-power 
lacked necessary man-power, 
116 

Science and Social organization, 
14 

Sea-power, Bases and the relation 
of these to land power, British 
overseas Empire formed on, 
75; Macedonian's, 55, 113; 
of Venice, 122; Question of 
base vital to, 172 

Self-control, 223; Basis of per- 
manent equality among nations, 
228 

Serbia and Austria, 189 

Serbians and Austrians in 1908, 
188 

Serbian Nationality, 188 

Slavs, German effort to subdue, 
185; German influence among, 
160; Revolt against Berlin, 185; 
South (Jugo-Slavs), Three 
tribes, 202; The borderland, 197; 
Treatment of by Austria, 187 

Smith, Adam, cited, 14, 173 

Smuts, General, 39 

Socialism, bureaucratic, 252 

Society, 12, 13; Organization of, 
14, 15; Momentum of illustrated, 
15-16 

State, The function of, 35 

Suez Canal, 66, 79, 97, 111 

Tartars, first called "Huns," 121 
Taurus Range, 130-131 



Tibetan Heights, 125, 127 

Tower of Babel, 229 

Trafalgar, effect on world's his- 
tory, 163 

Transiberian Railway, 119 

Transportation, great change in, 
in 1878, 174 

Treaty of Balkan Alliance, pro- 
visions of, 189; Belgrade 1739, 
160; Berlin, Austria's action in 
1908, 186-188 

Triple base of man-power, 136 

Turks from central Asia in Asia 
Minor, 133 

Ukraine, German Settlements in, 

160 
United States of America, Federal 

bureau of agriculture, 246 
Upper Oder, German settlements 

along, 157 
Universal Democracy (see League 

of Nations) 

Volga, The middle, remarkable 
moat to Russia and Europe, 
143-144-145 

Von Bttlow, 112 

War, Afghan, 1839, Russian in- 
trigue, 167; Balkan (first) 1912, 
188; Balkan (second), 189; 
Caesar and Antony, Civil war 
between, 55, 74; Congress Table 
at Vienna 1814, 3; European, 
Changes in Social Structure, 35; 
European and sea-power, 75; 
Napoleonic, 150; Prussia and 
Austria 1866, 152; Punic (first 
and second), 49, 50; Punic 
(Third), taking of Carthage, 50; 



INDEX 



Russia, Civil War in, 145; Russo- 
Japanese, 76, 188; South African, 
1900, 141; The Great War, 
America's entrance into, 78; 
Began as German effort to 
subdue Slavs, 185; Between 
Islanders and Continentals, 86; 
Britain's entrance into, 77; 
Causes of, 4; Dardanelles closed 
by man-power, 131; Ecole Mil- 
itaire, 183, 184; Events leading 
up to, 170-171; Finance in, 224; 
Germans and Slavs, balance 
between, the only safe outcome 
of, 186; Greek emancipation 
from German control, 204; 
Italy's entrance into, 78; Won 



by Allies, methods, recourses 
and warnings, 183-184 

Watt, James, 14 

Wilson, President, 32, 83 

World, Geographical Center of, 
110 

World Island, The, 79, 83, 87; 
Joint continents of Europe, 
Asia and Africa, 79; Limitation 
for purposes of navigation, 79; 
Two comparatively small re- 
gions the most important on 
globe, 104, 105, 106, 107 

World-Promontory, The, 83 

Xerxes, King, 48-50 

Yermak, The Cossack, 140-141 



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Every volume is absolutely new, and specially written for 
the Library. There are no reprints. 

Every volume is sold separately. Each has illustrations 
where needed, and contains a Bibliography as an aid to 
further study. 

Every volume is written by a recognized authority on its 
subject, and the Library is published under the direction of 
four eminent Anglo-Saxon scholars — Gilbert Murray, of 
Oxford; H. A. L. Fisher, of Oxford; J. Arthur Thomson, 
of Aberdeen; and Prof. W. T. Brewster, of Columbia. 

Every subject is of living and permanent interest. These 
books tell whatever is most important and interesting about 
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Each volume is complete and independent; but the series 
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hensive library of modern knowledge covering the chief sub- 
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Social Science, Philosophy, and Religion. An order for any 
volume will insure receiving announcements of future issues. 

VOLUMES ON HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHY NOW READY 

Rome By Warde Fowler. Canada By A. G. Bradley. 

The History of England The French Revolution 

By A. F. Pollarrd. By HlLAiRE Belloc 

T B^ STjSJSSjf AfnCa AShortHistoryof War&Peaca 
The Civilization of China *' ?. H. Perris. 

By H. A. Giles. The Irish Nationality 
History of Our Time (1885-1911) By Alice S. Green. 

By G. P. Gooch. The Papacy & Modern Times 
The Colonial Period By W. Barry. 

By Chas M, Andrews. Medieval Europe 
From Jefferson to Lincoln g y jj \y c. Davis. 

By William Mac Donald. m mm *l ' 

Reconstruction & Union (1865- N |P°' eon L FlsHER 

By L. P. Haworth. 1912) ** U ' A ' L ' FlSH = R ' 

The Civil War Modern Geography 

By r L. PLfsON. B* MARIAN I. NEWBIGIN. 

The Dawn of History Polar Ejplo ration 

By J. L. Myres. By W. S. Bruce. 

Peoples and Problems of India Master Mariners 

By T. W. Holderness- By John R. Spears. 

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The Third Edition, Revised and Enlarged, of 

THE HOME BOOK OF VERSE 

COMPILED BY 

BURTON E. STEVENSON 

has been revised from end to end — 590 poems have been 
added, pages renumbered, author, title, arid first line in- 
dices, and the biographical matter corrected, etc., etc. 

The hundreds of letters from readers and poets suggest- 
ing additions or corrections as well as the columns of 
reviews of the first edition have been considered. Poets 
who were chary of lending their support to an unknown 
venture have now generously permitted the use of their 
work. 

This edition includes the "new" poets such as Mase- 
field, Chesterton, Frost, Rupert Brooke, de la 
Mare, Ralph Hodgson, etc. 

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